Matthew Laznicka
Ruth Reichl was the restaurant critic for The New York Times from 1992 to 1998, where she famously dressed up in disguises in order to conduct reviews. She was the last editor at Gourmet before the venerable magazine closed. She’s written four autobiographical best-selling books — Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples, Garlic and Sapphires and For You Mom, Finally — that have established her as one of the world’s foremost food memoirists.
She’s also well known for her zen-like, poetic tweets.
In 2014, Reichl wrote her first novel, Delicious! A cookbook, My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Changed My Life is due out this fall.
Reichl spoke via phone with Isthmus in advance of her appearance at the Lunch for Libraries and the Meet the Make-Hers cocktail party fundraisers on June 2. Later that day, she will read from her novel at 7:30 p.m. at the Central Library as part of the Wisconsin Book Festival’s event series.
You set your novel at the offices of a food magazine. What was it about that experience that made you want to revisit it?
I did not want to be remotely autobiographical. So I chose a character as different from me as I could possibly imagine. She’s young, I’m not. She has a sister, I don’t. She’s shy, I’m not. She’s discovering New York, I was born in New York. I really wanted to have the experience of being someone else for a while. But if I’m going to do that, I should put it in a setting I know well. Because if I’m imagining someone who is not like me, I really have to have her in a world that I understand. I also have a lot to say about food and the place food has in our lives — about appreciating ordinary things in life, which is part of where my passion for food comes from.
Everyone knows the story that you would dress up, wear wigs and take on personas to do your reviews. The novel seems like an extension of that. What is it about the fascination with character and seeing from another perspective that draws you?
When I said to my editor, I’m not sure I know how to write fiction, she said, “First, your nonfiction reads like fiction, and two, you’ve been living fiction. When you turned yourself into other people you were essentially living fiction. So just take that and put it on the page.” I did feel that becoming Billie was a similar act to becoming another person. I think that’s partly why people write.
Have you been a fiction writer trapped inside the body of food writer all along?
Not so much that. As an unhappy child, I always escaped into books. Fiction is a great gift — that ability to leave yourself for a while and become another person, which is what good fiction does; it puts you in someone else’s skin for a while. People have their drugs of choice; mine is fiction.
Do you see the food critic’s role as having changed significantly since the advent of review sites like Yelp?
When I started writing criticism, most people thought of restaurant criticism as essentially consumer reporting, basically telling you how to spend their money — which is not what I wanted to do. What Yelp has done is taken over the consumer reporting aspect of criticism and let critics be real critics. If you read good criticism, you are better equipped to enjoy the experience [of dining]. And what I think good critics do is give you tools with which to evaluate the experience on your own, to give you history, context, point to things you should be noticing. I think as a result we have better restaurant critics than we’ve ever had before, because you can’t get away with saying “Yes, this is a good restaurant” or “No, it isn’t” anymore.
Were you surprised that after Gourmet closed there was a fallow period, but then food magazines exploded again — Fool, Lucky Peach, Cherry Bomb?
To me it’s wonderful. Most magazines now are done by focus groups. But these magazines are done with passion and have a point of view. I love that people are doing these magazines and doing what they care about, rather than what they think people will want. You don’t give people what they think they want; you give them what they didn’t know they wanted.
Do you have words of wisdom for budding young food writers, or fiction writers?
Writing is really hard, but if it’s what you want to do, do it. You only have one life, and it’s really important to do work that you love and keep at it. Follow your passion. I feel like I’m so lucky that I got to do work that didn’t feel like work. But that should be everybody’s goal. Money is just stuff, but work that you love gives you so much strength.
Ticket information for the fundraisers at mplfoundation.org.
