Blue Plate Special

June 10, 2013
Novelist Christensen (The Great Man) describes her 1970s upbringing in Arizona in this unpretentious memoir. The oldest daughter of a Marxist lawyer and Waldorf-educated cellist, Christensen always modeled herself after her tough, uncompromising, iconoclastic father, whose manic rages nonetheless ruptured the family, sending the Christensen, her mother, and two sisters to start life in Tempe, Ariz., where her mother took up graduate studies in psychology. The three girls flourished, immersed in the era’s consciousness-raising feminist literature and instant or experimental food, recipes for which Christensen dandles along her narrative without much ado (e.g., “farmers fritters,” “camping peas”). Her efficient, chronological chapters treat some of the details those years, such as her mother’s boyfriends and her own crushes, even the sexual predator at the Waldorf school she attended briefly in high school in Spring Valley, N.Y., but mostly the undercurrent eddies around the author’s persistent loneliness, which she indulged by solitary writing and gorging on comfort food like bread and granola. A stint in France (“flageolets en pissenlits”), followed by college in Portland at Reed, graduate school in Iowa City, and work in New York round out this frank memoir, with appropriate culinary offerings for the writer’s darker moods (“Bachelorette puttanesca”).

May 15, 2013
A novelist's deliciously engrossing exploration of her life through the two major passions that have defined it: food and writing. For Christensen (The Astral, 2011, etc.), memory and food are inextricably intertwined. Her book begins with the recollection of a violent argument between her parents over an egg-and-toast breakfast. This scene reminded her of not only the simple comforts of her mother's "blue plate special"-style meals, but also of the troubled dynamic that seemed inherent in male-female relationships. Not long afterward, her mother divorced and took the author and her sisters to Arizona. In this "wild, strange place that was so profoundly different from Berkeley," Christensen suddenly became aware of "taste and texture, flavor and smell" and began reading as voraciously as she ate. Later, drinking became another source of comfort. In between attending classes at a New York arts high school, Christensen overate, crash dieted, and then wrote about her hunger and her loneliness. She refined both her palate and her cooking abilities during a year spent in France. But it would be comfort food and hard liquor that would comprise many of her meals during the vagabond life she led afterward, first at Reed College and then at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where she reignited a childhood passion for food in literature. A few alcohol-soaked, undernourished years later, she met her first husband, who "taught [her] how to enjoy food without guilt or remorse or puritanism," but with whom she fought constantly. Middle aged and unwilling to try out the "strange new world of hookups and sexting," she found unexpected love with a man 20 years her junior who fed her soul with the peace she had craved all along. A Rabelaisian celebration of appetite, complete with savory recipes, that genuinely satisfies.

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July 1, 2013
Novelist Christensen (The Astral, 2011) pegs her tangy memoir of a peripatetic life to the endless quest for sustenance and the nurturing of the self. In her first food memory, she's just eaten her favorite breakfast, soft-boiled eggs, when her father viciously attacks her mother. An anxious and overly responsible child, she vows to help her mother and relies on books for solace and enlightenment. I began with eating and moved on to cooking just as I began with reading and moved on to writing. Christensen tracks her food and literary adventures from California to Arizona, France, upstate New York, Oregon, Iowa, New York City, and New England, through tumultuous relationships and jobs as varied as short-order cook and corporate secretary. Harmonizing with her nostalgia for childhood comfort food, or blue plate specials, Christensen writes with savory, home-cooked clarity as she digs deeply into the pleasures and dangers of food, charting the culinary fads of the 1960s on as well as changes to women's lives while zestfully telling intimate, harrowing, and hilarious tales of appetites corrosive and nourishing. Recipes included.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

February 15, 2013

PEN/Faulkner Award winner Christensen doesn't just write fiction (e.g., The Great Man); she writes about food on her eponymous blog. In this memoir, an in-house favorite, she talks about food to relate, more broadly, her off-kilter upbringing and current, reportedly happy life. Pitched to fans of Ruth Reichl and Gabrielle Hamilton's Blood, Bones, and Butter.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2013
Christensen's ("The Great Man") latest is quite a departure from her typical fiction works. In this memoir, the author unflinchingly shares her far-from-idyllic life, from growing up with an abusive father to her lifelong desire to satisfy her appetites for love and belonging. Christensen ties the events of her life story together using food; whether expressing joy, grief, loss, or love, there is a cuisine to go with it. Prolific narrator Tavia Gilbert's expert performance makes listeners feel they are catching up with an old friend. VERDICT Fans of food memoirs, such as Gabrielle Hamilton's "Blood, Bones & Butter" or Ruth Reichl's "Tender at the Bone", will be delighted. [See a Q&A with the author and the narrator on page 60.]--Donna Bachowski, Orange Cty. Lib. Syst., Orlando, FL

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.