Book Club reads Reichl's Book about her Mother

Ruth Reichl is known as a restaurant critic and editor of Gourmet magazine. The CPAE Book Club read her book Garlic and Sapphires a couple of years ago, a fun series of tales of how she went incognito while reviewing restaurants in New York City.  Other books by Reichl have been greatly enjoyed by book club members, including Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me with Apples.

When we last discussed Reichl,  I was astonished and intrigued by stories about her mother, a woman who was difficult to be around and who had served such bad food at her parties that people were literally taken to the hospital.

For May 20th, we are reading Reichl’s latest, a small book entitled Not Becoming my Mother, & other things she taught me along the way.

When we are selecting our books, all non-fiction by women, we try to include a wide array of different types of books. This year, we have read two voluminous biographies by Linda Lear, of Rachel Carson and Beatrice Potter, both of which are detailed and fascinating.  This little book, Reichl’s tribute to her own mother, is quite the opposite of Lear’s scholarly biographies, or Rebecca Skloot's book about Henrietta Lacks and her immortal Cells that we read last month.

Reichl had long wanted to make it up to her mother for the amusing “Mim Tales” she passed along in her writing.  She felt she owed it to her mother to write her biography, which would be based on a semi-legendary box of notes that her mother had gathered together for the purpose of writing her autobiography, which was never written. For many years, though, Reichl repeatedly ran into a mental block against finding the box. After nearly twenty years, deciding that the notes were probably lost for good, she went down into her basement and found the box, crammed full of notes and letters in her mother’s hand (plus letters from other people in her mom’s life including Reich’s grandparents) and spanning the entirety of her mother’s eighty-plus years.

This emotional discovery led Reichl at last to read through her mother’s life, to learn the story of how her mother had earned a doctorate in music at the age of 19  -- her two marriages -- her bookstore -- her stop and go attempts at a career -- and the immense frustrations of her life.

This has been a wonderful book to read around Mother’s Day,  as Reichl’s tribute to her own mother’s attempts to help her daughter avoid the pitfalls in life she herself had fallen into. In writing about her mother, Reichl also tells about the stultifying boredom preying upon educated middle class women who were told by society to stay home and let the men do the work.  Reichl contrasts her mother’s working life with the mental problems that arose when she quit working.

The book is a loving portrayal of a mother Reichl had longed to escape. Through her brave journey into the words and times of a troubling person, Reichl discovers the love and the sacrifices that lay hidden beneath the distresses of her mother’s life.

Please feel free to comment below, whether you've read the book or not!

Our book club meets on Third Fridays at the Old Parish House, 4711 Knox Road, from 7:30 - 9 pm.