Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table: A Collection of Essays from the New York Times

A collection of essays originally published in the New York Times Magazine, along with the recipes that accompanied them, "Eat, Memory" is organized by themes -- Struggles, Loss, Coming Home, Discoveries, and Illusions -- and the writers range from screenwriters and poets, to novelists and food writers. The recipes, themselves, range from Boston Baked Beans to a Cream of Watercress Soup. Something that comes through, is the link between food and important memories (thus, the title), both positive and negative. Some of the stories are deeply personal, others more humorous and all of them are quite good. Hesser is a food writer herself, along with being an editor at the New York Times, and the choices she made in putting this collection together show both great thought, and the quality of the poll she chose from. If you haven't seen the food column in the NYTM, this is a good sample for you, and will maybe give you something new to read online each week.

I found the concept of this collection intriguing: "Writers know that if you want to portray a person succinctly, tellingly, you describe the way he eats." Or so opines editor Amanda Hesser, author and food writer for the New York Times Magazine since 2004, who has assembled "food inspired recollections" of America's leading writers, the best essays from the magazine's "Eat, Memory" column. The submissions are from twenty-six novelists, playwrights, poets, screenwriters and others who have bridged that vast emotional territory of food, experience and the creative process. The result is a series of essays that explore food and memory in related, emotionally-charged chapters: "Illusions", "Discovery", "Struggles", "loss" and "Coming Home". The combinations are infinite, the connections of food and memory profound, at least in the words of the authors in this unique book: Dorothy Allison, Chang-Rae Lee, Billy Collins, Yiyun Li, Patricia Marx, Tucker Carlson, Kiran Desai, Pico Iyer, Manil Suri, Allan Shawn. Like recipes, these essays are deeply personal, filled with the ebb and flow of emotional nuance and the way memory inserts itself into life and writing in the most intimate manner. Like any complexity, food is loaded with emotion, smell evoking a stream of long-buried associations, sometimes comforting, occasionally painful. By sharing their recollections with readers, we have an opportunity to open our imaginations and embrace these experiences, to add them to the words that form the stories of our society, human connections that seek to include rather than isolate. In "Expatriate Games" (Loss), John Burnham Schwartz writes of Sunday dinners that became a weekly ritual: "Between feasts and sometimes during- life-altering decisions were made, hearts broken, songs badly sung." In "Turning Japanese" (Coming Home), Heidi Julavits confides: "Two months later I am spiritually annihilated by contentment. I haven't had a craving in months, and... I forget to worry about my uncertain future." RW Apple's "The Dining Room Wars (Discoveries) takes an eclectic perspective, food from everywhere, from New York to Saigon to Africa: "I am neither High Church or Low- or rather I am both at the same time." And poet Billy Collins confronts "The Fish" (Illusions): "and thus my dinner in an unfamiliar city... was graced not only with chilled wine and lemon slices but with compassion and sorrow." Bon appetite. Luan Gaines/ 2008.