For the new Netflix series, Tembi Locke joined forces with her younger sister, Attica, a successful novelist and TV writer, to adapt her own memoir.
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By Chris Vognar
When Tembi and Attica Locke were children growing up in Houston, they would sit on their grandmother’s orange-and-red shag carpet and make up games to play.
There was “store,” in which various transactions would take place. There was “family,” wherein the sisters represented two different families that lived across the hall from each other in a fancy New York apartment complex. They let their imaginations run wild, coming up with different scenarios to pass the time.
“We would play all of these story games,” Attica said earlier this month in a joint video interview with her older sister. “And then somehow we found ourselves through our adult professions checking in with each other.”
They’re still playing together. This time, however, the whole world can see the results. Together, they created “From Scratch,” a Netflix limited series, premiering Friday, that is based on Tembi’s memoir of love, loss, food, family and Italy. Attica is the showrunner, a first for the accomplished novelist (“Bluebird, Bluebird”) and screenwriter (“Empire”). Tembi, best known as an actress (“Never Have I Ever,” “Eureka”), is executive producing for the first time.
Suddenly they were a team again, creating a world together.
“I think you can go it alone, but it’s very nice to have somebody with whom you have this shared memory and these shared experiences,” Attica said, speaking from her home in Los Angeles. (Tembi had joined the call from a getaway to the mountains just outside the city.) “You have a shorthand way of talking, and there’s nobody on earth that makes me laugh as hard as my sister does.”
It’s not an easy story. In 1990, when Tembi was 20, she moved to Florence to spend a year studying art, part of an exchange program from Wesleyan University. While there, she fell in love with Saro, a soulful Sicilian chef. The feeling was mutual. After a whirlwind courtship, they started a life together in Los Angeles, where Tembi pursued her acting career.
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