What makes this “memoir, with recipes” so powerful is that Kate Christensen is committed to finding and telling her truth, whether it involves a richly complex gourmet soup or a simple can of cold peas shared around a campfire.īlue Plate Special’s particular brand of tastiness brings me straight back to the author whose “memoir, with recipes” is somewhat different, yet no less special: Laurie Colwin. No wonder Christensen’s first included recipe is called “Dark Night of the Soul Soup.” All of her appetites are addressed in Blue Plate Special, including those a lesser artist might have chosen to discreetly gloss over, like her adolescent fumblings towards domestic normalcy in a splintered family and her adult alcoholism. In her prologue, Christensen ( The Epicure’s Lament, The Great Man), says: “Food is a subterranean conduit to sensuality, memory, desire, but it opens the eater to all of it without changing anything.” To change something through eating requires the eater to connect the conduit to its source - and that can be painful. So when I learned that this week’s TueNight theme was “Tasty,” one book sprang immediately to mind: Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites by novelist Kate Christensen, which was recently released in paperback.
I once wrote an entire blog post about the difference between “memoirs with recipes” and “memoirs, with recipes.” It’s the latter that I prefer, books in which recipes are not the main course, but a sweet lagniappe appended to excellent, incisive writing.
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