When I have to write about food, I keep John Berger and his Into Their Labours trilogy at the front of my brain, particularly the book Pig Earth. I tend to read pretty happily within the great books of the western canon.
That's impossible to nail down – the whole perfection of a book is when you find it and it finds you, just as you are ready to receive its brilliance. I have much more interesting and honest conversations with strangers within the first few minutes of meeting. What has changed for you since it was first published? When I was finally able to view the prose with the same objective evaluation I could have for a plate of food coming down the line on its way to the customer.įour years to stare at the damned thing and about a year to actually write it. I really started to have fun with the writing when I developed the muscle and discipline to take care of the story in the exact same way I would take care of the food in my restaurant – when I became able to determine what was too "salty", too "rare", too "sandy" about the text in front of me. I listened to this advice from my friend David Young: "The voice? The voice is you talking to the smartest person you know about everything you hate about the subject with the most compassion for it that you can muster."
How to evoke both the romance and nostalgia of something that I was simultaneously mourning the loss of and regarding with a jaundiced eye, and then to maintain a voice that I could bear to listen to for 85,000 words. In essence, I did everything I could to remove my own ego and apprehensions and just be the person who – metaphorically speaking – cooks the food and cleans up afterwards. I also made a commitment to write "hospitably", as I have been trained to be in the kitchen – to do everything I could to take care of and to serve the reader as I would take care of and serve a guest in my restaurant. This gave me the permission to just do my absolute best within my limited skill set. Then I had a frank conversation with myself in which I admitted that I was not as talented as I wish I was. Then I spent another six months savaging what little work I had managed to produce. I spent the first three and a half years resisting, denying that I was writing a memoir and erasing two thirds of what I was writing because in every lit class I've ever taken the category of memoir is dismissed, demeaned, and considered weak, confessional, and "girly".
How did you come to write Blood, Bones and Butter?
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