Menus and Memories: An Interview with Ruth Reichl

The sense of taste and our memory are, say scientists, inexorably linked, so perhaps it’s natural that one of the country’s preeminent food writers has made a career out of penning memoirs. Ruth Reichl, author and the former editor-in-chief of Gourmet Magazine and New York Times restaurant critic, will be in Hudson Oct. 9 for a day that incorporates both food and memory.

Since her background is in art history it seems Reichl became a food writer almost by chance.

“I fell into it,” she said, “like most people fall into things.”

She said after graduate school at Michigan State University she moved back to New York City.

“I thought I would just waltz into MOMA and they’d need a new curator,” she laughed. “To my horror they didn’t.”

She was living on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and having large dinner parties for friends. At the time, she said, the neighborhood was still an ethnic enclave with Little Italy still vibrant and Chinatown close by. She began “cooking all these foods and collecting recipes.”

A friend suggested she write a cookbook and the 21-year-old took her friend’s advice.

“In those days you could do that. No one asked me what my credentials were,” she said. “Everyone thought I was a food writer and it went from there.”

Two years after her cookbook “Mmmmm: A Feastiary,” was published in 1972, Reichl was living in California and was the co-owner and cook of the collective restaurant The Swallow. She was part of what would become known as the “culinary revolution,” centered around Berkeley, which focused on using fresh, seasonal and local ingredients in cooking. From this small epicurean epicenter began a mass movement that changed the way many Americans eat.

Reichl said she has happily watched “the great evolution of American food culture and how it has become part of the popular culture. I’m thrilled, but not surprised. My whole career I’ve been waiting for Americans to wake up to food.”

Food has seemingly always played an important part in Reichl’s life as evinced by three of her four memoirs in which food looms large, the overarching theme that ties her life together.

Writing about the people in her life Reichl’s descriptions can often seem unflattering, but, according to the author, she always writes the truth.

“If you’re writing a memoir what’s the point if you’re not going to tell the truth,” she said. “If not, you might as well write fiction.”

Reichl admitted that she probably couldn’t have written her first memoir, “Tender at the Bone: Growing up at the Table,” had her parents still been alive.

Her latest memoir is “For You Mom, Finally,” which explores her mother’s life and how that generation of women were mostly relegated to being housewives.

In a way, she said, it was an atonement for how she presented her mother in the first memoir.

While her earlier descriptions are all true, she said, so are those in the latest book. “It’s just the other side of the coin,” she said. “She was a very difficult and exceedingly generous woman.”

The change in her perception of her mother came about gradually as she read through a box of old letters and diaries her mother had been writing for a better part of her life.

“I didn’t know,” she said of this other side of her mother. “It was a side she kept to herself.”

The impetus for the book began with a speech Reichl had written for what would have been her mother’s 100th birthday.

“I knew from my speech that ... I had empathy for my mother and her whole generation of women,” she said. “I did not expect to find self-awareness. It was a real surprise.”

Reichl said that through writing the book she discovered just how much her mother had sacrificed for her daughter.

“It was a really difficult experience,” she said. “I cried practically every day while writing that book.”

Writing the book, she said, finally allowed her to “grow up fully” and see her parents not just as her parents, but as people. “You let go of them,” she said.

According to Reichl, another big surprise for her was how some of her readers reacted to the book.

She said she discovered that there was a generation of young women in America who seemingly don’t want to have the kind of life her mother’s generation yearned for, that is, a meaningful existence outside of the home in a job that they loved.

In the book’s afterward, Reichl recalls a young woman in her late teens in the audience on one of her book tour stops who told her that she didn’t want to “be Superwoman” and hadn’t yet decided between career and family, apparently believing doing both wasn’t an option.

“I couldn’t believe that this still existed in this country,” said Reichl.

The book went through a name change when it came out in paperback. It was originally titled “Not Becoming My Mother.”

The title was chosen by her editor, but Reichl felt it sounded harsh. When the paperback version was released it had the title that the author had originally pushed for.

Reichl’s next memoir will be exploring her time at Gourmet Magazine, where she was editor-in-chief for a decade before the publication was shuttered in October 2009.

She recently signed a book deal with Random House for the memoir, along with a new cookbook and her first novel, “Delicious.”

When she spoke to the Register-Star, she had just returned from a month-long stint at the MacArthur Colony in New Hampshire where she was working on her novel.

“It’s about halfway done,” she said.

She has also accepted a position at Random House as an editor-at-large where she will be working on her books and looking for new titles, among other duties.

When asked if there were more memoirs on the horizon, Reichl answered that with the next one she’ll be caught up, so “it depends on how long I live.”