Tender At the Bone: A Review

I didn’t make New Year’s Resolutions this year, and here’s why: there are so many good intentions followed by such little follow-through. If everything I promised I would do over the years had come to fruition, I would not only be competing in Strongman challenges and be rich beyond my wildest dreams, I would also have a series of twenty published novels to my credit before I turned thirty-five. Instead, I’m tubby and lower-middle-class and writing weekly columns for this place. Hooray!

If I had made a resolution this year, it likely would have been learning to cook. Had I done so, I would have probably failed miserably and gone back to eating Frosted Flakes for dinner. But because I didn’t promise myself I would take on a new skill, I’ve been cooking three to four nights a week, and baking on the weekends, and attempting stuff like mushroom bisque on special occasions. Ah, the many ways my own self-interest works against me.

When I stumble across a new interest, what solidifies it in my mind is the peripheral stuff. I love Star Trek, but review sites and message boards are what keep the interest perpetuating. I make it to Disney World as often as I can, but I’ve got website and podcasts during the in-between times. So when I got into cooking, I went casting about for interesting people talking about cooking. What I found was Ruth Reichl.

Funny but true: Reichl’s name was not unfamiliar to me. I used to work in a bookstore, and I’d often shelve Reichl’s stuff. I loved the titles – Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me With Apples, Garlic and Sapphires – all of which very evocative. So when I stepped into a bookstore this time with the intention of casting about for food writing, the very clear thought in my brain was, I need to find someone like Ruth Reichl to read.

I searched for a good fifteen minutes – fifteen minutes! – before I literally stopped myself and thought, Oh, guess who writes EXACTLY like Ruth Reichl who you haven’t read yet, Kev? Ruth fucking REICHL! My brain, I swear to God.

I purchased the book and dove in immediately. Sometimes there’s a barrier between me and new writers, one I have to dissemble bit by bit in order to start falling under their spell. It’s that self-interest thing again: I always want something new to read, but I have psychological blocks that prevent me from enjoying new stuff, at least at first. At all events, that didn’t quite happen with Reichl. Instead, her writing acted like a Space Invader, one of the really nasty ones that blast your forcefield away far quicker than you can shoot them back. Reichl didn’t just break down my silly reading barriers; she obliterated them:

“Most mornings I got out of bed and went to the refrigerator to see how my mother was feeling. You could tell instantly just by opening the door.”

She had me hooked by the first paragraph.

I had expected something like a cookbook with anecdotes about how these recipes came to her. What I got instead was a memoir of a fascinating, schizophrenic childhood and adolescence, and how food and cooking served as one of the very few constants in Reichl’s life. It might not have worked so effectively if Reichl’s life weren’t fascinating – or if she had allowed herself to get lost in the fascination – but just as food is Reichl’s anchor throughout her weird journeys, she is ours. We relate to her because she seems like an ordinary person thrust into extraordinary situations.

The best portion of the book – and it’s hard to choose, really, because almost everything in here is “best” – is her recounting her first excursion to France. The excursion had not been her idea, but rather that of her bipolar mother. For a time, Ruth resents the trip … until a friend of hers invites her home for dinner. The description of Reichl’s first fine French meal is worth the cover price alone – you can almost taste the soup sliding down your throat. It’s moments like these – high points among the high points – that make Reichl’s writing so extraordinary.

As the recipes become more complicated – and there are plenty of recipes, despite my insistence that it’s not a cookbook – so, too, does Ruth’s life, and we as readers are richer for it. Tender at the Bone hurtles toward its anxious cliffhanger finale (yes, anxious cliffhanger finale; if you didn’t think a cooking memoir could have one of those, you’re wrong), and we hurtle with it, identifying not only with Reichl’s ability to find solace within chaos, but also with her sheer storytelling genius. Anyone can write a cookbook or a memoir; it takes a special sort of writer to combine them into something greater than either.