For the first chapter, the tone of this memoir annoyed me: too pat, and too much dialogue, which I find a tricksy thing in nonfiction. It’s too distracting: I’m sitting on the R train reading and wondering if she really remembers what her first husband said on that day twenty-three years ago, if she wrote it down or is approximating it, and if people really talk that way—which they maybe do, but it comes across as jarring, or false, or maybe it’s just that I think it could be better described than reproduced. Luckily, things improve. When Reichl writes about food, or just about the things around her (a Paris apartment, a clawfoot bathtub), it’s delicious. <\/p>\n
I was won over by the time I got to the end of chapter three, the heady story of an affair that includes things like this: “He liked to start the day by strolling through the flower market and listening to the birds. Every morning he woke me with fresh flowers. Then he took me to Ladurée for coffee and croissants and we sat there, beneath the ancient paintings of nymphs and angels, bantering with the waitresses in their black dresses and white aprons” (40). And this: “Colman raised his glass and suddenly I saw, through the bubbles, Notre Dame flooded with silvery light just across the Seine” (42). And this: “The scrambled eggs with truffles were even better than the foie gras. Minutes earlier I would not have thought it possible. Each forkful was like biting off a piece of the sun. It was like musk and light, all at once, and suddenly I burst out, ‘This is what I always imagined sex would taste like.'” (42). <\/p>\n
This book also is pleasing because of the way it captures a moment in American cooking\/food culture that I hadn’t really thought much about: dacquoise desserts everywhere, garlic as exotic, Chez Panisse as just-opened, galangal as an ingredient requiring “serious research.” Reichl writes about having balsamic vinegar for the first time; when she first tastes it, it isn’t yet commercially available in the US. That said: I wasn’t at all interested in cooking any of the recipes that appear at the end of the chapters, and even late in the book, there were still a few passages of dialogue that seemed flat or like they’d be better as pure description, but I liked all the food and the love and the hope in this book enough that I didn’t mind too<\/em> much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For the first chapter, the tone of this memoir annoyed me: too pat, and too much dialogue, which I find a tricksy thing in nonfiction. It’s too distracting: I’m sitting on the R train reading and wondering if she really remembers what her first husband said on that day twenty-three years ago, if she wrote […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}