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Oct. 30th, 2006 05:25 pmI finished Ruth Reichl's memoir Tender At the Bone last night. Reichl, the former restaurant critic of the New York Times and editor of Gourmet magazine, relates the story of her life from childhood up to the point in her early thirties when she gets her first food writing job. She uses the book to tease out of the origins of her love of food, and shares a few recipes and a great many food-related anecdotes.
Reichl's life is fascinating, and there's no shortage of incident to keep the book moving. She talks about her tumultuous childhood with a mentally ill mother, years spent at a boarding school in Montreal, adventures in North Africa, life in a hippie commune in Berkeley, a honeymoon spent bumming around Greece and Italy on a shoestring. Every story she tells features descriptions of food, and these are marvelous: handmade raspberry tarts in the French countryside, egg-filled Tunisian pastries, her first taste of brie, fresh organic soups in Berkeley--Reichl makes you feel like you can taste them all. Unfortunately, she doesn't write about herself nearly as well as she writes about her meals.
The biggest weakness of the book, in my opinion, is its lack of depth. Reichl tells us all sorts of things that happened to her, but she never really lets us in; we don't get to know her as a person through this book. She discusses her mother's mental illness and describes what it was like to grow up in her household, but she never made me really feel it. Everything is surface level. I was also somewhat frustrated by the sameness of some her anecdotes. Reichl includes about a million different variations on the theme of "cute American child surprises snooty Europeans with the sophistication of her palate," and, frankly, it got old after the second such story.
One thing I liked about the book (besides its excellent title) was how long it took Reichl to figure out what she wanted to be doing with her life. She spent years and years doing not much of anything--traipsing all over the world, cooking for her friends in the commune--before she finally started getting involved in food-writing. It's very reassuring for me to read about someone who started out like that and still became successful; I have a bad tendency to think of the last five years of my own life (five years I spent doing something I thought I would want to do forever, and now can't wait to get out of) as wasted time, and Reichl provides a good example to contradict that. Look, Katie, she fucked around way more than you, and for way longer too, and now look at her--she's the editor of Gourmet magazine!
All in all, it was a pleasant read. Very light and quick, and not demanding in the least. I probably would have been good on a beach. I doubt I'll seek out the rest of her memoir series, though. I've had enough of Ruth Reichl for the time being. I think I'm going to read Marilynne Robinson's Gilead next. I loved the excerpt that ran in the The New Yorker a couple years ago, and after Tender At the Bone, I'm feeling ready to sink my teeth into something a bit more literary.
Reichl's life is fascinating, and there's no shortage of incident to keep the book moving. She talks about her tumultuous childhood with a mentally ill mother, years spent at a boarding school in Montreal, adventures in North Africa, life in a hippie commune in Berkeley, a honeymoon spent bumming around Greece and Italy on a shoestring. Every story she tells features descriptions of food, and these are marvelous: handmade raspberry tarts in the French countryside, egg-filled Tunisian pastries, her first taste of brie, fresh organic soups in Berkeley--Reichl makes you feel like you can taste them all. Unfortunately, she doesn't write about herself nearly as well as she writes about her meals.
The biggest weakness of the book, in my opinion, is its lack of depth. Reichl tells us all sorts of things that happened to her, but she never really lets us in; we don't get to know her as a person through this book. She discusses her mother's mental illness and describes what it was like to grow up in her household, but she never made me really feel it. Everything is surface level. I was also somewhat frustrated by the sameness of some her anecdotes. Reichl includes about a million different variations on the theme of "cute American child surprises snooty Europeans with the sophistication of her palate," and, frankly, it got old after the second such story.
One thing I liked about the book (besides its excellent title) was how long it took Reichl to figure out what she wanted to be doing with her life. She spent years and years doing not much of anything--traipsing all over the world, cooking for her friends in the commune--before she finally started getting involved in food-writing. It's very reassuring for me to read about someone who started out like that and still became successful; I have a bad tendency to think of the last five years of my own life (five years I spent doing something I thought I would want to do forever, and now can't wait to get out of) as wasted time, and Reichl provides a good example to contradict that. Look, Katie, she fucked around way more than you, and for way longer too, and now look at her--she's the editor of Gourmet magazine!
All in all, it was a pleasant read. Very light and quick, and not demanding in the least. I probably would have been good on a beach. I doubt I'll seek out the rest of her memoir series, though. I've had enough of Ruth Reichl for the time being. I think I'm going to read Marilynne Robinson's Gilead next. I loved the excerpt that ran in the The New Yorker a couple years ago, and after Tender At the Bone, I'm feeling ready to sink my teeth into something a bit more literary.
