Who knew? There really ARE memoirs worth reading!

books:

	• Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table Ruth Reichl Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2002 - 302 pages average customer review:based on 90 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Fabulous

I absolutely love all of Ruth Reichl's food memoirs. And even though I read all of them through the library, I've gone back and purchased them for friends and a copy of my own to read and reread again.

SPOILER ALERT!

** spoiler alert ** For me this was a much more difficult book than "Tender at the Bone," emotionally speaking. I have an eight-and-a-half month old daughter, which is very near the same age Reichl's daughter, Gavi, was when they had to give her back to her birth parents.

I was also more deeply troubled than Reichl probably wanted her readers to be by her affairs. Even as she seemed happier with Michael, I never felt quite settled, and wanted things to be back the way they had been earlier in her relationship with Doug. I do appreciate that she was unwaveringly candid about her affairs, but the months (years?) of dishonesty were almost surreal for me to imagine (but then, I'm applying that to my relationship).

My very favorite parts were Reichl getting used to her job as a restaurant critic, learning what things were "expected" of her position and how that conflicted with her hippie lifestyle, and, as always, her writing about her family. Her writing about her father is so tender and realistic that I really got invested in their relationship. She also writes about her relationship with her mother well, and I think she does a good job of making the reader understand their old arguments and the roles they make the other fall into -- like "PussyCat" -- on a very emotional level.

I would give this three-and-a-half stars if I could, because I felt troubled throughout the book by her (and her husband's) affairs in a way that wasn't ever really resolved for me. Not that I expected it to be taken care of neatly -- these are real human lives, after all -- but I just never felt comfortable because of it.

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Who knew? There really ARE memoirs worth reading!

Ruth Reichl, Comfort Me with Apples (Random House, 2001)

Oops, I did it again. I read the first chapter of Ruth Reichl's second memoir, Comfort Me with Apples, back in January. And then, just as I did with her first one, I basically lost the book in a pile of stuff I'm in the middle of for four months. I haven't figured out whether the problem is my prejudice against memoirs, which in the main I despise, or whether Ruth Reichl just can't write first chapters. But once again, just as with the first one, when I rediscovered the book at the bottom of a pile, realized it was painfully overdue at the library, and decided to force myself to read a chapter a day until it was finished, I started chapter two, and then ended up devouring the rest of the book in twenty-four hours.

Reichl picks up where she left off in Tender at the Bone, driving across the Golden Gate Bridge. We go through the next few years of her life. I'm not terribly sure you can call anything in a memoir a spoiler, but I'll forego the details just in case. As I said before, I'm not a big fan of memoirs. In fact, usually I can't stand them; they're boring stories written by boring people who are usually embellishing the details anyway (if not making things up out of whole cloth) and who often wouldn't be famous had their memoirs not gotten big and made them stars. Would you gave ever heard of the Sheffs without the father-and-son crystal meth memoirs? Of course not.

Ruth Reichl, however, writes an entirely different form of memoir. While she's obviously recounting the details of her journey from a commune in Berkeley to the top dog at America's premier food magazine, she often plays second fiddle not only to the rest of the folks surrounding her, but also the food. Yep, it's food porn, but in nonfiction form. Hard to go wrong with that. Also hard to believe that the kind of food she's talking about was actually being pumped out in the late seventies. In a world where chefs are celebrities and half the people you bump into on the street can argue with you over the relative merits of different strains of shallot, it makes perfect sense. But in the late seventies, when they only people who had heard of Wolfgang Puck were the people who'd actually eaten at Spago (and those only if they were paying attention)? Pretty amazing. Good lord, do I wish someone had given David Rosengarten a TV show fifteen years before they actually did.

At the heart of it all, though, like every other kind of book, a memoir is only as strong as the power of its writing. (And most... oh, I'm sure you're sick of hearing me go there.) Reichl is, of course, a writer. It's what she does. Not that that's a guarantee of success; a number of people who work in shorter forms never make the successful transition to book-length manuscripts. Reichl does just fine. (Except for those first chapters.) She can write about other things just as well as she writes about food. Writing about food is all about sussing out the details, and if you can take that and apply it to other things, then you've got what it takes. Reichl's got it in spades. There's a chapter towards the end of the book about she and her husband trying to adopt that's just heartbreaking to read. It's that devil in the details, you know? They're what makes it work. And it works very well.

I'm still not sold on the memoir as a viable genre, but when it works, it works well. And Ruth Reichl's memoirs, at least the two I've read, work well. ****

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I rushed, too

Like the other reviewers, I rushed to finish this book, staying up until 3 a.m., so I could find out the conclusion. This is one of the most enjoyable books I've read in months.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

In this delightful sequel to her bestseller Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl returns with more tales of love, life, and marvelous meals. Comfort Me with Apples picks up Reichl?s story in 1978, when she puts down her chef?s toque and embarks on a career as a restaurant critic. Her pursuit of good food and good company leads her to New York and China, France and Los Angeles, and her stories of cooking and dining with world-famous chefs range from the madcap to the sublime. Throughout it all, Reichl makes each and every course a hilarious and instructive occasion for novices and experts alike. She shares some of her favorite recipes, while also sharing the intimacies of her personal life in a style so honest and warm that readers will feel they are enjoying a conversation over a meal with a friend.

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