Making Piece: Love, Loss, and Pie

A fateful, sorrowful trajectory takes Los Angeles journalist turned pie maker Howard from an erratic, far-flung career back to her origins in Iowa, which just happens to be the pie-baking capital of the country. Married for six years to Marcus, a German automotive executive, though separated from him in 2009, contemplating divorce and living far apart, Howard learns that her 43-year-old husband has died suddenly in Germany of a ruptured aorta, stemming from a congenital condition not deemed problematic. The news plunges Howard into a period of down-spiraling guilt and self-examination, and she drifts back to Portland, where they once lived together, to indulge her grief and anger, before casting back to her therapeutic pie-making days at Mary’s Kitchen in Malibu. With the help of her friend Janine, a TV producer, she takes her pie-making skills on the road, specifically in Marcus’s beloved RV called the Beast. Team Pie travels from town to town shooting a pie documentary (also a potential TV pilot), interviewing bakers at legendary diners from San Francisco to L.A., and giving out free pie on National Pie Day (January 23) in downtown L.A. Howard’s long-winding, occasionally tedious, and forcibly pie-trope-heavy journey finally deposits her serendipitously at the American Gothic House, in Eldon, Iowa, made famous by painter Grant Wood. Here she reigns as America’s Pie Lady, rendered in one unique, crazy-quilt, truly American tale of reinvention. (Apr.)