People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking?
The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But the
People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking?
The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.
I've only recently begun to read MFK Fisher - definitely one of the doyennes of American food writing - and I can certainly understand why she has passionate devotees. Her writing is vivid, distinctive and definitely flavourful. It has, always, a strong point of view. It doesn't focus so much on recipe and technique as much as does it sensation, atmosphere and memory.
This book is a memoir of her development as a woman and a food writer. It is episodic, a series of vignettes punctuated by journeys. Although she begins by describing some early memories from her California childhood, and a brief stint at a Midwestern university, most of these vignettes take place in Europe or or the various ships she takes as she crisscrosses the Atlantic. She lived in France with her first husband Al and Switzerland with her second husband Dilwyn/Tim (she refers to him as "Chexbres" in the narrative). Most of these journeys are set during the 1930s and occasionally the turbulent politics of that decade intrude. Bizarrely, she and her second husband travel to Switzerland in 1940 - and although Switzerland, and their own personal tragedy, are buffers of a surreal sort, one is still very aware of the fact that Europe is at war. One of the most affecting chapters, for me, is a journey she takes from Europe to the United States on a 'staidly luxurious Dutch liner'. She is travelling to the US in order to break the news to her family that she is divorcing her first husband; most of the other people on board the ship are 'fleeing' Jews. At times this book is just so surreal and so charged with tragedy. It ends, bizarrely, with a family trip to Mexico in 1941 and lots of beer and a cross-dressing (possibly transvestite) mariachi singer. There is a lot of drinking, and sometimes the drinking eclipses the eating. One is often reminded how smoking and heavy drinking were so much more the norm in that era than they are now. Fisher is the kind of person who prides herself on her 'masculine' appetites, and she occasionally points out her superiority by demonstrating her knowledge of wines and her ability to surprise by ordering a particularly fine cognac
Fisher has a particular gift for recreating the people she met on her journeys and waiters and landladies play a large role in her memories. Nobility (in the sense of largeness of character) and various forms of absurdity and grotesqueness seem to accompany her everywhere, in the people she meets and the (sometimes very strange) scenes she describes. It's impossible to know when her memories edge into fiction, and I suspect more often than not; but that doesn't really spoil the story-telling.
I'd like to read this rich book again someday. I need a little rest first, though....more
The title of this book is rather irresistible right now, in the coronavirus times, but I read it as a light interlude and as a break in the mammoth taThe title of this book is rather irresistible right now, in the coronavirus times, but I read it as a light interlude and as a break in the mammoth task of reading Ellman’s latest: Ducks, Newburyport. Both books share Ellman’s screwball sense of humour and wacky charm, but this one is an elliptical satire of love, romance and art history, while Ducks encompasses a larger world of problems.
The narrator, styled ‘Our Heroine’, is a virgin in her early 30s with a fondness for tea and toast. She is holding out for a big romantic love, but decides to spend some time studying art history at the Catalfque (a thinly veiled Courtauld Institute) while she waits for LOVE to find her. Isabel is a big fan of Babs Carthwheel’s 391 novels - Barbara Cartland, natch - so she has some rather unrealistic ideas about love. At the same time, she is highly dubious about her own personal charms.
People say that if one loves a man, one should tell him. The trouble is, I deal with rejection badly. ... I find it difficult to carry the situation off with aplomb. I, a thirty-one-year-old virgin with dark hairs that go every which way on my big toes. I, with a permanent stain on my left eye from a ping-pong accident in childhood. I, with my knobbly knees. I, bony as a goat, with a distended stomach to match. And hardly any breasts to speak of (should I wish to speak of breasts). I, whose auburn locks are not brought to life by sunlight. I, whose eyes do not have a translucence. I, with moles in unmentionable places. ... How could I say to someone, ‘I love you’?
Isabel cannot figure out why her plump, promiscuous roommate Pol keeps making out (and off) with all the men.
It’s all a bit silly, really; but as with all good satire, there’s a few sharp points here and there....more
I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look ‘right’ to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. Th
I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look ‘right’ to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the names of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places. (From ‘California Notes’, 1976)
I was born in Sacramento, and lived in California most of my life. I learned to swim in the Sacramento and the American, before the dams. I learned to drive on the levees up and downriver from Sacramento. Yet California has remained in some way impenetrable to me, a wearying enigma, as it has to many of us who are from there. We worry it, correct and revise it, try and fail to define our relationship to it and its relationship to the rest of the country. (From ‘Where I Was From’, 2003)
In the final paragraph of ‘California Notes’ - a collection of notes which were meant to be about Patty Hearst, as a privileged Californian, but became more about their author Joan Didion, who also defines herself as a privileged Californian - you can sense the writer beginning to evolve a subject which took her 30 more years to fully address in this memoir. The subject is the West, the Golden State, California: the meaning of California, not just as a state but also as a state of mind. And by examining her home state, with its manifold attractions and repulsions, Didion is attempting to both construct an origin story and to also turn it inside out and examine it for errors, even lies. The errors and lies were there right from the beginning, she concludes.
One of the tags I hesitated over, and then finally chose to describe this book is ‘mythology’. Much of Didion’s dissection of California has to do with the mythologising of that place, not just in the wider culture, but also more specifically by her family - who count themselves as special, and rarified, because they come from early settler stock. When Didion begins to debunk the myths she was raised with, to examine how romance was so often divorced from reality, she alternates between examining her own family history and the impressions and analysis recorded by other writers. Veins of traditional memoir are like the gold seams running through the rock of writing with a more journalistic and general bent. Large portions of the book are devoted to specific historical and cultural moments, some of them occurring in the early 1990s, and chosen by Didion to explore and amplify the contradictions of the place. Her writing sometimes seems to meander, but invariably it swoops back to close the circle of a particular line of thought.
A good deal about California does not, on its own preferred terms, add up.
This extreme reliance of California on federal money, so seemingly at odds with the emphasis on unfettered individualism that constitutes the local core belief, was a pattern set early on, and derived in part from the very individualism it would seem to belie.
Not much about California, on its own proffered terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.
One difference between the West and the South, I came to realise in 1970, was this: in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.
Hers is an extreme example of the conundrum that to one degree or another confronts any Californian who profited from the boom years: if we could still see California as it was, how many of us could now afford to see it?
We believed in fresh starts. We lived in good luck. We believed in the miner who scratched together one last stake and struck the Comstock Lode. We believed in the wildcatter who leased arid land at tow and a half cents an acre and brought in Kettleman Hills, fourteen million barrels of crude in its first three years. We believed in all the ways that apparently played-out possibilities could while we slept turn green and golden.
That I should have continued, deep into adult life, to think of California as I was told as a child that it had been in 1868 suggests a confusion of some magnitude, but there it was....more
I read this collection immediately after finishing Where I Was From (2003) and realised that it should have been the other way around, if at all.
‘NotI read this collection immediately after finishing Where I Was From (2003) and realised that it should have been the other way around, if at all.
‘Notes on the South’ is the first and much longer piece in this book, and the material comes from a month-long road trip through the ‘South’ (various locations in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama) that Didion took with her husband John Gregory Dunne in 1970. Dunne is a shadowy figure in the piece, only vaguely alluded to as a dinner companion - and for some reason, which she never explains, she does not wear her wedding ring whilst travelling through this conservative, ‘Bible Belt’ part of the country. That, and the fact that she wears a bikini, and her hair long and straight instead of ‘done’, makes Didion stand out, seem ‘Californian’ - with everything that was louche and suspect about California in 1970. There is a tension, and a feeling of being at odds with the landscape and its people, from the very beginning of the journey. That tension culminates in this final paragraph: ‘A senseless disagreement on the causeway, ugly words and then silence. We spent a silent night in a airport motel and took the 9:15 National flight to San Francisco. I never wrote the piece.’
The writing is laid down in impressionistic fragments and organised mostly by geographical segmentation: e.g., ‘Down the Delta to Greenville, or by events: e.g., ‘Swimming at the Howard Johnson’s in Meridian’. Her writing style is strongly impressionistic, sensual, evocative. There is a lot of detail about the weather and landscape. She occasionally transcribes conversations she has with Southerners, mostly focusing on their attitudes to racial issues, agriculture and the lack of industry. The atmosphere is dense and claustrophobic, not only because of the hot humid weather, but also because of the attitudes she clearly finds unbearable. As the trip progresses, she begins to speak longingly of airplanes and the possibilities of escape.
It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?
At the beginning of the piece, she acknowledges that she has no specific reason for visiting the South other than ‘a dim and unformed sense’ that the South and the West are linked in some way, and that both had something to do with ‘the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center’ of the United States. Almost 50 years after these words were written, Nathaniel Rich writes an Introduction to this book in which he attempts to convince the reader that these words, this feeling of Didion’s, turned out to be prescient. I wonder, though - and this is from the hindsight of also reading ‘Where I Was From’ - how much of this urge to travel through the South is more of an ‘origins’ impulse for Didion.
The second piece in the book, titled ‘California Notes’, is much shorter and begins as an unwritten article about Patty Hearst. In trying to make sense of Patty Hearst - her privileged background, her identity as a Californian, and then her (some would say psychotic) break with her past - Didion ends up writing more about herself. Much of this material - in some cases, nearly word for word - ends up appearing later in her memoir.
In both ‘Where I Was From’ and ‘Notes on the South’, Didion writes about her childhood experience of living in Durham, North Carolina in 1943 (because her father was stationed there with the Air Force). Interestingly, to me, she repeats the same memories in both books - about some Gone with the Wind paper dolls, and the fact that Southern children liked to eat dirt - but she remembers them differently. In 1970, she remembers being a participant; by 2003, she writes more from the point of view of an outsider who is denied these experiences (‘off limits to me’). These are small but telling details, I think. Not only do they point to the plasticity of memory, but also to the tendency that even famous journalists have: to select and then shape the details to suit the story that they want to tell.
This book doesn’t pretend to be anything other than excerpts ‘from a notebook’ and it has to be judged in that context. There is some beautiful, evocative writing here, but it has not really been shaped enough to be truly satisfying to read. ...more
I was just sort of skimming through this one for a while, not at all sure if it was for me, when I was suddenly won over. Clever, funny and3.75 stars
I was just sort of skimming through this one for a while, not at all sure if it was for me, when I was suddenly won over. Clever, funny and nerdy in the best sort of way, it takes elements of the adventure story and the quest story and melds them into something unexpected.
Written in 2012, when e-readers were all the rage and the ‘end of the book’ was being forecast with gloom or glee (depending on your POV), at first it seemed like this story was just going to be one big metaphor for why bookshops were going out of business. Just like the San Francisco based bookshop from which the novel takes its name, bookshops seemed like places catering to an eccentric few, and containing only arcane OK (‘old knowledge’). Compared to the shiny mind-bending possibilities of new tech, bookshops (and the physical books they traded in) seemed like a no longer viable format and a dusty relic. Not so.
I learned a few things - about Aldus Manutius, early books, typefaces, the accession table used by museums and archives and the inner workings of Google (maybe) - but mostly this was just an enjoyable romp with a likeable cast of characters. It’s a ‘book about books’, but not quite in the sense you might imagine....more
I’m writing about something else. A marriage, I guess. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what str
I’m writing about something else. A marriage, I guess. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill to their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them.
Nearly all books have a period of acclimatisation - when the reader is settling into the voice, the style, the shape of the narrative, the outlines of the most important characters - and for me, this book took longer to acclimatise to than most. I didn’t begin to sink into it, or really enjoy it, for at least 200 pages, and it was only in the last 150 pages that I felt that hungry compulsion to read on. To some extent, this was because I resisted the voice of the narrator: Lyman Ward, retired historian, self-described ‘gargoyle’, and chronicler of this tale. Lyman is attempting to piece together the story of his grandparents, Oliver Ward and Susan Burling Ward, partly to understand the longevity of their marriage and the basis of their commitment to one another. His description of his ‘project’ (as quoted at the beginning of my review) does not appear until p. 211, but it takes far, far longer than that to really understand the personal nature of his inquiry. As a reader, you really do have to stick with Lyman’s long and winding narrative because it only resolves itself at the very end of a rather long book.
The other difficulty with the book is that way in which it skips back and forth in time. Lyman has some primary documents at hand, some news clippings, magazine articles featuring his grandmother’s writing and art, and many of her letters (primarily those to her best friend Augusta), but he alternates between these ‘sources’ to a semi-fictionalised account of their lives in which he plays puppet master. These sections of the book could be read more seamlessly, and with more trust, if Lyman weren’t always popping into the narrative and reminding the reader that this ‘story’ of his grandparents’ lives is his own construction. Additionally, the narrative often breaks away from its Western landscapes in the 1880s and 1890s to focus in on Lyman’s own life, sequestered in his grandparents’ final home in Zodiac Cottage, Grass Valley, California, 1970 - and mired in a painful body and an equally unpleasant stew of anger and regret. His own sections of the story are told from the first-person point of view, which just reinforces our sense that Lyman is shaping the story and might not be such a reliable narrator.
Although the book is about Oliver and Susan Ward, and in a very profound sense about marriage, it’s also an adventure story about the American expansion into the West - not just California, but also Colorado, the Dakota territories and Idaho. It’s about the ways in which engineering conquered, or least shaped, the natural landscape, and about how commerce and greed brought men (and a few women) west. Opportunity, and the chance to make one’s fortune, go hand and hand with failure and disappointment and retreat. Although Oliver is an engineer and inventor who possesses every good quality of intelligence, ingenuity, grit and hard work, he is also too trusting and short on the ‘talkee talkee’ required for business success. Over and over again, he is described as a man of honour and integrity, and one who ‘never did less than the best he knew how’, but his integrity often leads to his downfall, and a reversal of fortunes for his family. The West, and probably America too for that matter, was ‘made’ and defined more by unscrupulous men than good ones.
Set in 1970, at least during Lyman’s first-person portion of it, the novel is also about values - and what Lyman perceives to be the superior values of the ‘Victorians’ (represented by his grandparents) as contrasted with the louche, even amoral, behaviour of the youth of his time. At times, the 1970s portion of the book (its language, its characters) seems ludicrously dated, and it can really jar with the historical passages.
I hesitate to relate too much more about the plot, for fear of spoiling the meaning of the story as it unfolds. What I admired about it - not so much while reading it, but afterwards - is how the sweep of the story alternates between a bird’s-eye view to something shaped and (more to the point warped) by the slant of an individual consciousness. It is a tragic book in many ways, and sometimes very painful to read, but I think that endurance is meant to be the key-note. In the end, it touched me very much . . . but it was a long journey to get there. 4.5 stars
Note: As I read through my review, I realised that it focuses almost entirely on Lyman Ward and his grandfather Oliver Ward. Actually, Susan Ward is the centre of the story - and I think that one’s reaction to the narrative can pivot on how much one sides with, or sympathises with, or even despises, her thoughts and actions. Because Lyman gets to shape the story, and because our thoughts about patriarchy have changed much since the 19th century, or even since 1970, I think that the character of Susan is elusive, controversial and even, in some sense, a cipher.
Other quotations of the book which moved me in some way, either because of the lyrical quality of the writing itself, or because of the philosophical depth of what they conveyed.
About Milton, the ancestral home of Susan Burling:
Milton was dim and gentle, moulded by gentle lives, the current of change as slow through it as the seep of water through a bog.
Present and past were less continuous than synonymous. She did not have to come at her grandparents, as I do, through a time machine. Her own life and the life of the grandfather she was writing about showed her similar figures in identical landscapes.
I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to?
About Oliver Ward:
She saw in his face that he had contracted the incurable Western disease. He had set his cross-hairs on the snowpeak of a vision, and there he would go, triangulating his way across a bone-dry future, dragging her and the children with him, until they all died with thirst.
That does not mean he was foolish or mistaken. He was premature. His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn’t yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid. Like many another Wester pioneer, he had heard the clock of history strike, and counted the strokes wrong. Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
As she walked from room to unfinished room making pleased or judgmental noises, she was resenting her husband’s wordlessness, she smouldered with grievance that he would not submit to talking their problems out. It was harder to get words from him than it was to get gold from rock. He tortured her with his silence.
On time:
No life goes past as swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
I’ve not read many ‘rock star’ memoirs, so it’s difficult to judge how good this one is by comparison. I can reliably say the following: incr4.5 stars
I’ve not read many ‘rock star’ memoirs, so it’s difficult to judge how good this one is by comparison. I can reliably say the following: incredible life? (Yes), strong voice? (Yes), entertaining? (Yes), laugh out loud funny? (Yes), great stories about the musical world (Yes). Indeed, Elton John has as many great stories as he does songs - well, almost as many. Additionally, he is brutally honest about himself - and doesn’t shy away from describing how his ferocious ‘Dwight family temper’, his various addictions (drugs, alcohol, food and sex), his competitiveness and his selfish, diva-like ways have been huge factors in his life story. He is also fabulously generous, loyal and kind-hearted - more often than not, to a fault. Although he does attempt to explain his creative process, he seems to compose music more or less effortlessly. Having said that, he does emphasise that this creativity is backed up by a long apprenticeship in classical music lessons, session playing and endless gigging.
This is a fast-paced book which never really flags - although the tone does get more ‘sober’ as he recounts his later years. Considering that his later years include sobriety, fatherhood, the deaths of many close friends, and illnesses of his own, this is hardly surprising. Even when he is describing his own worst behaviour, his honesty and self-deprecating sense of humour make it impossible to think too badly of him. In fact, I finished the book having huge respect for this musical legend. ...more
I try to be fair in reviews - and by that, I mean I try to take the book (or the author’s aims for his/her book) seriously. My pleasure in reading theI try to be fair in reviews - and by that, I mean I try to take the book (or the author’s aims for his/her book) seriously. My pleasure in reading the book is one thing, but my acknowledgement of the book’s merits (whether or not I ‘enjoyed’ them) is another. I try to consider both, which means that my rating is sometimes a compromise signifying nothing.
First of all, this book is compulsively readable and it is ‘smart’ - and by smart I mean that it is very hip to modern vernacular of every kind: dialogue, personality types, neuroses and the lingo associated both with academia and the self-help and self-improvement industries. Most readers will know immediately if they like this kind of smart, savvy, ultra-contemporary tone. There is humour in it, but all of it is dark and neurotic.
The protagonist is a 38 year old woman named Lucy who has spent her adult life working on a dissertation on Sappho and existing on the fringes of the academic world and its just-maintenance funding. She has also had a long-term but part-time unsatisfying relationship with a geologist named Jamie. She lives in a subsidised apartment in Phoenix. In other words, she isn’t very secure or tethered to the ‘adult’ world of possessions, pensions and relationships. When her relationship finally derails, and Lucy starts losing the plot, she gets invited to her older half-sister’s house in Venice Beach for the summer. She is house-sitting and dog-sitting, but it’s understood by everyone that this is an act of emotional charity from her sister. In addition to her dog-sitting responsibilities, she has promised her sister to attend a women’s support group.
Most of the book is about women who engage in high-risk and self-destructive behaviour because they are constantly seeking self-validation through sex (and the always elusive promise of love). The idea of a hole that needs to be plugged is explored in both emotional and graphically physical ways. Love is a drug, a high, a promise - but these women are portrayed as addicts who are always just one rejection away from a death-urge. The author explore this idea in a really interesting way - taking the book into realms of magical realism, but also tying it into the Greek mythic theme introduced by Lucy’s subject of choice (Sappho).
The book is graphic about sex to the point of being gross and even scatalogical. Personally, I did not find the sex erotic in the slightest. I sort of admired its ‘realness’ but I would have preferred something less in-your-face (ugh, literally). I could probably, at a stretch, ‘defend’ the way that Broder depicts sexuality in this novel, but I emphatically did not enjoy it.
I also found the women overly neurotic and dysfunctional. Perhaps some readers will take comfort in how far Broder goes, in her ‘truth’, but this is not female sexuality or identity as I have ever experienced or known it.
All in all, an interesting fictional experiment for me - but I would not want similar books as a steady diet. ...more
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