It's taken half a month to recover enough mental ground to talk about all of it, but there you go.
If you did, in fact, read that blog post, you'd also see that I kind of broke one of my typical NaNo rules this year, and decided to read books during the time I was writing. Instead of taking my standard sabbatical from non-NaNo material, I allowed myself to dive deep into the world of Food Memoirs, in the hopes that it might spur on my own creative process, too.
So, in the full month of November, I not only ended up writing 50,000 words of my own food memories, but I sifted through four books worth of material on the same subject! Whether this made my writing better or worse, who's to say? Still, I had quite the enjoyable time doing it... and when I was struggling so hard with my own writing, it was nice to take a mental break by enjoying someone else's hard-won material.
Here's what I read:
The Comfort Food Diaries: My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart, Emily Nunn
A woman who has undergone a marathon of personal loss - grappling with a sibling's suicide, her fiance's breakup, and her admittance into a psychiatric ward of a hospital for severe alcoholism - decides to embark on a journey to find true comfort in food, as well as come to grips with her difficult upbringing. The food Nunn describes did sound delicious, and definitely got me craving some Southern, especially country-style ham and biscuits. And what a variety: there are far over 50 recipes present in the book itself... a feat I find impressive, despite the fact that at least four of them were for various salad dressings (and that's not including the ones that were for actual salad).
I really liked the way the recipes were integrated into the body of the story line, occurring interspersed throughout the surrounding narrative, instead of being bunched up at the end of the chapters, or held separate in an appendixes at the back of the book. It was like the food described was telling a story of its own, and none of it was too overly complicated, or too heavy on ingredients or technique, to seem inaccessible or overly difficult.
However, the rest of the writing seemed to fit that bill.
The style of writing is juvenile, especially evident in how the writer is prone to long, meandering lists, whether describing food or scenery, even when inappropriate for the story. This syntactical choice, as well as the equally wandering and poorly defined timeline of her life, made it very difficult to get a read on what time period various events were taking place in. At first, just from the first few chapters or so, I assumed she was in her mid-30s, because she seemed flighty, prone to humble brags about her ex-fiance's wealth or her career success, and seemed vaguely nervous. When later chapters appeared describing friends with children who'd left for college, or how she hadn't spoken to others in over 20 years, I felt confused.
She also could have been more forthcoming with the unspooling of various family ties. Revelations on her relationships with her mother, father, sisters, and brothers, came spread out and in chunks, with little through-thread to keep them knotted together. Barely anything was outright stated. For instance, her mother - narcissistic and controlling - is off-handedly described as having regular meetings with a psychiatrist, possessing a voracious and destructive tendency to be too dramatic or take things too far, while also swinging into bouts of depression or anxiety that would leave her unable to get out of bed. It is emphatically clear that she suffered from some form of mental disorder, but that is never explicitly stated, nor is it named, but instead, briefly intimated in the vaguest of terms.
Final Verdict: All in all, it was a fairly middle-of-the-road Food Memoir, one whose personal narrative I found frustrating, but whose genuinely friendly culinary content made up for its faults.
Coming to My Senses: The Makings of a Counterculture Cook, Alice Waters
A memoir detailing not only Alice Waters' journey to founding influential California restaurant Chez Panisse, but specifically, of how her youth and adolescence in the '60s and '70s shaped many of her counterculture perspectives on cooking.This book really was a tell-all, in the sense that Waters is able to traverse a wide swath of her life in candid and unapologetic terms. The stories range from details about her childhood, family, and move to California, to her time at UCSB and Berkeley, trips to Paris and across Europe, and her social sphere back home in California (including notable director Francis Ford Coppola and costume designer Jacqueline "Jacqui" West).
However, because of this wide-spanning subject matter, the memoir really served as more of a foundational perspective rather than a comprehensive or strictly culinary one. On the whole, it becomes a testament to the idea that greatness can come from anywhere and anyone, no formal training required, just a love for food and a willingness to try something a little different.
My favorite parts were hearing about her foundational culinary experiences in her youth and home life, as well as opening night of Chez Panisse. It felt like there was a lot of talk about politics and Waters' experience in alternative movements, but these deviations were hardly non-essential: they laid a distinctive and underlying framework for how her culinary ideas germinated, too.
Final Verdict: This memoir didn't contain recipes, but had plenty of pictures, of not only Waters in her youth, but of her many influences and friends. The true power of this memoir wasn't necessarily the story itself, but how candid and vocal she was about her past.
A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from my Kitchen Table, Molly Wizenberg
The author of popular early-adopter food blog The Orangette tells the story of her early life, growing up with foodie parents, falling in love with France and then her husband, and making a life for herself in Seattle, through mouthwatering terms.You know how it's recently become a popular move to start dissing food blogs for writing long intros to their recipe posts? People claim its a sort of money-grubbing ploy - that it allows for the insert of more ads, that they make more for how far you have to scroll or something - but honestly, while it might be true for some, it is clearly not so for others. This book is a great justification for the practice, for why those intros exist: it allows the blogger to share more of who they are, and what this particular recipe means to them.
In a way, this book is kind of like a bundle of such posts, with a delicious recipe capping off every few pages or so of content. As a result, this book is also fairly easy to read through as the content is chunked into bite-sized pieces you can enjoy fairly quickly.
The only problem with knowing that a memoir has a blog, is that invariably, about halfway through, you decide to start doing some research. Finding out about Wizenberg's divorce from her husband, made reading about falling in love with him a little more difficult. Even though their relationship is still amiable, and they continue to own and operate the restaurant Delancey - in Seattle - together, it makes the words feel less full of meaning, even if it was truly meaningful at the time.
I'm genuinely excited to try some of these recipes, and almost all of them are things I'd be excited to eat. I do wish that this book contained some food pictures, because parts of it really just read like a regular cookbook.
However, I should mention a MAJOR pet peeve: I absolutely cannot stand the word "gulp" - I think it's gross, and somewhat unsettling - but only really got a handle on how much I hated it when Wizenberg used it in THREE CHAPTERS IN A ROW. Again, each of these chapters is only about five pages long. In total, I might have seen it in various places throughout the book about six more times. Pick a new word!
Final Verdict: Lovely stories - complete with engrossing settings and relatable characters - make up Wizenburg's relaxed and personable cookbook-slash-memoir, as a portrait of a particular period of her life. When considered as a framed example of her perspective, it is truly captivating.
Women Who Eat: A New Perspective on the Glory of Food, edited by Leslie Miller
A really fantastic collection of "up and coming" female writers (circa 2003), many focused in the Pacific Northwest, in a celebration of womanhood and food, be it prepared for them, by them, experienced, shared, bought, passed down, cooked themselves, or tasted countless times.At times personable and impartial, emotionally-laden or distant, stories of attending cooking school, staffing a restaurant, tasting an old favorite again after a long absence, and more, many personalities are fitted neatly within its pages. Not only a reflection on a wide variety of food from a wide variety of perspectives, but shares a wealth of reasons how the food we eat affects our lives, from our friends, to habits and behaviors, to our identities themselves.
From the delicious (Carvel ice cream, in the face of a daunting doctor's visit to ascertain a cancer diagnosis), to the controversial (a woman who, in her post-pregnancy, cooks and craves the taste of her own placenta, as an act of recycling and reclamation), from the funny (a once-waitress tells the story of her favorite post-college restaurant job), to the familial (a California vegan reflects on the vegetables of her farm-raised, meaty Midwestern upbringing), the myriad of perspectives encountered within the pages of this collection truly run the gamut. The guarantee isn't even that you come away hungry, but that you reflect more on your own culinary connections to how your food shapes your life.
With the book being a decade-and-a-half old, naturally one of my first moves, was to scour the list of author names for any that I might still recognize. To my surprise, there she was: Cheryl Strayed, who, in the author's info section, is listed as living in Portland, Oregon, and "working on a book-length memoir." Wonder how that project panned out for her.
Did you take part in NaNo this year? Do you enjoy reading Food Memoirs? Let me know, in the comments below!
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