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- Womens memoirs - |
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Tender at the Bone |
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 Tender at the Bone:Growing Up at the Table by Ruth Reichl Broadway Books, 1999 ISBN 0767903382 Reviewed by author Susan Albert Ruth Reichl has been a food editor and restaurant critic for the LA Times and NY Times and is now the editor of Gourmet Magazine, but if you're thinking that Tender at the Bone is just another foodie book, think again. Sure, it has recipes (18 of them, most simple, all tantalizing) and plenty of mouth-watering descriptions of food, cookery, and dining. It's also a tasty, tantalizing book, a smorgasbord of entertaining character sketches and often hilarious food adventures. But Tender at the Bone has its serious side. It tells the disturbing tale of a family thrown into chaos by a manic mother, the "Queen of Mold" whose idea of a gourmet meal is a stewed two-week-old turkey carcass. It is an almost-classic rite-of-passage journey of a lonely young girl whose parents abandon her to the care of others, leaving her to discover that food comforts (Alice's Apple Dumplings), food seduces (Devil's Food Cake), and food expresses our deepest cultural longings (Serafina's mother's Coconut Bread). As she meets helpers who encourage her to outgrow her controlling mother, Ruth graduates from waitress to commune cook to restaurant chef to food writer, stumbling into her vocation along the way in this wonderful journey of self-discovery. Food is a "way of making sense of the world," Ruth says in an introspective moment, or as another character succinctly remarks, "I have to keep tasting." Tender at the Bone is a sweet, funny, light-hearted memoir whose lessons are dished out with a deft hand. At the same time it is a revealing self-study. The author's insatiable appetite for life, her compelling need to "keep tasting": to savor adventure, sample many lifestyles, delight in diversity, relish discovery, learn, create, and grow. It is a nourishing book, in all its various dimensions. -- Susan Wittig Albert is a best-selling author and founder of the Story Circle Network, an organization for women who want to explore their lives through writing. For information about the Network, go to www.storycircle.org Be sure to visit Mystery Partners, Susan Albert's website. |
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