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Comfort writing >> Tender at the Bone is the recipe of Ruth Reichl's life by JULIET WATERS
I'm a few minutes late for my interview with Ruth Reichl. This could be a tricky situation because I have no idea what she looks like. I wait five minutes and then start getting nervous. Instinctively, I reach into my bag and pull out Tender at the Bone, Reichl's memoir. For me, autobiography has always been the comfort food of writing. It's rarely a technically impressive genre, but when done well it's one of the most satisfying, and Reichl's is one of the good ones. Within seconds the hostess is at my side. She points at the book and in a tone reserved for deities, says: "She was here. She was here all morning, but she's gone now. I don't think she's coming back." A beaming waitress appears in the next second. "She's coming back. She said she was just going out for some fresh air." Surrounded by lunch-hour deli mayhem, both women are planted like trees next to my table ready to point to Reichl as soon as she walks in. Writers don't normally get treated like this, but this writer is the restaurant critic for the New York Times. Reichl's been doing media at the Snowdon Deli all morning because she thinks this may have been the place where, as a teenager, she tasted the smoked meat sandwich that would launch a lifetime search for the best food. When Reichl arrives she looks nothing like what I expected. This skinny, elegant, charming woman bears zero resemblance to the overweight girl with low self-esteem that she was in 1961. This was the year when Reichl's manic-depressive mother told her she was taking her to Montreal for a weekend and then, without warning, left her in Collége Marie-France for a year. Traumatic as this experience was to the unilingual New York teenager, it turned out to be a much needed break from a loving but insane mother whose cooking was relentlessly awful and dangerous enough to poison 26 people at her son's engagement party. One miserable day Reichl escaped from Marie-France and wound up in a restaurant where she ate a sandwich she describes as "the best thing I'd ever eaten in my life." From that moment, Tender at the Bone chronicles a quest for the food that will relieve the pain of an interesting, funny, but painful life. A life that one reviewer found too painful. Reichl's memoir was recently savaged by Martha Stewart for lacking the joy that should accompany the art of serving and the gossip that should accompany the story of Reichl's ascension to one of the most powerful positions in the food world. But Tender at the Bone is not about the Food People. It's about people who love food. People from Reichl's life who are rarely well adjusted: an alcoholic maid from her childhood, a psychically wounded roommate, an old bachelor artist in love with Kingsley Amis' ex-wife. It's a picaresque tale of wonderful food addicts. Reichl laughs off the Stewart review: "I thought it was perfect. How could Martha Stewart be interested in anything that I was interested in? She's interested in the surface. I'm interested in the people behind the food. She wants it to look perfect and not be too real. And I want the stuff underneath." Reichl talks easily about her book, her parents, the absurdity of people who go to journalism or cooking schools in the hope of becoming food reviewers. "My advice to people who want to do this is to just go out and live." And her advice to anyone who wants to do this and maintain her perfect figure? "At one point I made this decision that I was never going worry about food again, that I was just going to put total faith in my instincts. Then one morning I woke up, the weight was gone and it never came back." Like the story of her life, this is comforting food for thought. Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl, Random House, hc, 283 pp, $32
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The face on the hostess at the Snowdon Deli is about as sour as the pickles. It's lunch hour, it's very busy and there's one table left. "No, nobody here is waiting for anyone." Grudgingly she gives me the last table, like maybe I'm making up this "meeting someone" story as a ruse to avoid sitting at the counter.