Timing is everything. In real estate, in publishing, in espresso, in friendship.

I met Erica Bauermeister when she had just mailed her book manuscript to a potential agent in New York. We met because I’d taken two pies in handled baskets by bus to a teacher appreciation lunch.

The pies prompted a reference to a book we’d both read and the beginning of a friendship. After clean-up she offered to drive me and my pie baskets back to Ballard. By the time we parted I’d learned she had co-authored my favorite anthology “Let’s Hear It For The Girls” and that she would be out of the real estate business in 25 days.

Through the Secret Garden Bookshop Erica will be reading from that now published manuscript, “The School of Essential Ingredients,” on Monday, April 20, 6:30 p.m. at the Ballard Library. Timing is everything.

When I met Erica she had an opening in her life; characters who had been living with her had gone to New York without her in search of an agent. With her daughter in college and her son a senior in high school Erica was ready “to take a leap of faith.”

As of Jan. 1, 2008 she would be out of real estate. On Jan. 16 an agent signed on; by Feb. 5 the agent had found a publisher.

In short order, there was even a publication date for “The School of Essential Ingredients” – Jan. 22, 2009.

The rapid acceptance belies the years of work that is in Erica’s basement - writing that didn’t find an agent, and it passes over too quickly years of firsthand experience that went into this book even before two years of concentrated effort.

The day that we sat talking in front of my house in her new two-door (non real-estate) car she said her husband described her novel as “food porn.” That description stayed with me, although “The School of Essential Ingredients” is so much more.

The work is more accurately described as interrelated stories of people who happen to be attending an adult cooking school on subsequent Monday nights. Reading the loose page manuscript I pictured “Lillian’s” classes set in the kitchen at Bruce Naftaly’s Le Gourmand. There is a Ballard connection to an important setting in the novel but the distinction belongs to another kitchen – one with a fireplace in a house on Sunset Hill.

The national reviews are glowing and Erica has been busy with readings and publicity for the novel since its release in January. It’s the kind of read that is satisfying on so many levels, appealing to the senses and the sensibilities. If her readers have one complaint it is they wish the book were longer so that they could spend more time in the company of characters such as Lillian, Tom, Carl, Isabel and Antonia.

Erica admits she herself becomes more deeply attached to places than to people, and it’s the places that really sink into her heart. First her in-laws farm outside of St. Louis, then the northeastern Italy town of Bergamo, then that house on Sunset Hill with the fireplace. When someone in the audience member asks what parts of the book are real, Erica cites just two things: killing crabs (from a cooking class) and the house on Sunset Hill with a black-and-white tile entry and fireplace in the kitchen.

But there is another place that influenced Erica’s literary voice. Erica, her husband, Ben, and their two children spent two years in Bergamo, Italy, from 1997-1999.

“It changed all of us,” she said. Erica then considered culinary school and worked on a memoir about their time abroad. But as the years passed and her adult time returned she began working on fiction, financed by real estate.

“The fiction is actually more personal, more emotional maybe, than the non-fiction," she said.

When in real estate, Erica was inside thousand’s of homes throughout Seattle, many of them in Ballard. A mother and daughter looking for a house with a yard for their dog were among her first clients.

It took her several weeks of discussion surrounding the right settings for the dog before she learned there was not yet a dog. She’d assumed she would see the worst in people during the house-buying process; to her surprise she saw the best in them. Gracious moments in trying times, unspoken communication between couples.

Although real estate was supposed to be a financial sideline in order to insure that her children would have funds for college, it became another means of learning about people and how they behave. It’s not a spoiler to say that things generally work out for her “Essential” characters; that has been her own experience.

To an outsider Erica’s publishing success looks like one that took place virtually overnight, a write-up in “Ladies Home Journal,” another in “People” magazine. But it is the hard-earned product of her adult life; her experiences losing a best friend and brother-in-law to cancer, her interest in the connections between food and healing, real estate and a sense of place.

“I always knew I wanted to write about that house," she said.

A few weeks ago we walked by the infamous house together, exclaiming at its lot size between main building, garden and carriage house, wondering about the existence of the fireplace that obsessed Erica and in turn her character Antonia.

“I don’t want to know,” Erica said. “In the book, it still exists and that’s all that’s important.”

But timing is everything. Just days after we passed the house went on the market yet again, billed as a 1908 historic landmark. Erica sent me a message with an exclamation point.

“They kept the fireplace!”

Erica Bauermeister will be reading and signing her book, “The School of Essential Ingredients,” at the Ballard Library on Monday, April 20 at 6:30 pm.