Tag: memoir

What I’m Reading: Coming to My Senses

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One of the first memoirs I read was the first of Ruth Reichl’s three, Tender at the Bone. I was immediately entranced and quickly inhaled her other two, Comfort Me With Apples and Garlic and Sapphires, followed by her 2014 novel Delicious! Reichl went on to be an incredibly important figure in food media, and her memoirs were written through that lens; we already knew where the story ended so she was showing us how she got there. The recent memoir of another important figure in the food world, Alice Waters’s Coming to My Senses, was also very interesting, but in a very different way.

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What I’m Reading: On Writing

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When I decided to get more serious about writing a novel, Jeff had the brilliant suggestion that I read Stephen King’s On Writing. I’m not a big Stephen King fan—horror isn’t my thing—but I had heard of On Writing from an episode of the podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour. They did an episode about Stephen King and devoted a surprisingly small amount of time to his commercial fiction, instead spending time talking about this book.  If I remember correctly, one of the panelists even said that he thought On Writing was King’s best work. So I picked up a copy, grabbed a highlighter and eagerly dug in. Continue reading →

What I’m Reading: The Vanity Fair Diaries

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It was fitting that I finished Tina Brown’s sensational memoir The Vanity Fair Diaries this week. Last week, she appeared multiple times on CBS This Morning’s coverage of the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. So I was delighted to see and hear her on TV, just so I would have her voice in my head as I finished up the memoir of her years as the editor of my favorite magazine, Vanity Fair. Continue reading →

What I’m Reading: A Body of Work

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When it came to reading, I used to be all fiction, all the time. I loved (and still do love) the escapism, the imagination and the different writing styles that are all part of the genre. But a couple years ago I picked up my first memoir, Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone, the first of her three memoirs chronicling her food-influenced childhood up through her years as the NYT Restaurant Critic, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. These days, I think what pulls me into memoirs is that there must be an aspect that I can relate to or am interested in, Continue reading →