'Not Becoming My Mother' by Ruth Reichl
BOOK REVIEW
The influential food writer and editor sifts through the life and legacy of her mother, mistakes, misery and all.
Ruth Reichl is a commanding and daunting figure in American culture. Beginning in the 1970s, she played a key role in revolutionizing food and restaurant journalism, wielded make-or-break influence as a restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times and later the New York Times, and continues to loom large as editor in chief of Gourmet magazine.
With her fourth book, "Not Becoming My Mother: And Other Things She Taught Me Along the Way," however, Reichl looks backward and inward in an attempt to understand and explain her mother, both to herself and to us.
At barely 100 pages, "Not Becoming My Mother" is a meditation rather than a memoir but is no less affecting for its brevity. Reichl is performing in public what is, after all, a rite of passage: the contemplation of a deceased parent. In that sense, her little book is an exploration of one of life's biggest mysteries.
Ironically, Reichl's mother, named Miriam but known as Mim, was an eccentric and sometimes reckless cook whose misadventures in the kitchen included at least one incident of mass food poisoning. The book opens with an account of the day Mim prepared a snack for her daughter's Brownie troop by throwing together various items from the kitchen, including a bowl of moldy pudding. Not only did the little girls survive, but one of them asked if Mim would give the recipe to her mother.
"I couldn't do that," Mim replied. "The recipe is an old family secret."
Reichl readily admits that she has trafficked in quite a few of what she calls "Mim Tales," including the food poisoning incident that opens her first memoir, "Comfort Me With Apples."
"Although I omitted the most embarrassing tales, the first time I held the printed book in my hands I winced," she writes here. "I could not keep from thinking that I had betrayed my mother." With this new book, then, she "wanted to make it up to her."
So, on what would have been her mother's 100th birthday, Reichl sets to the task. She begins by composing a speech in which she gives a brief, harsh but insightful portrait. We learn that Mim's youthful aspirations to become a doctor were squelched by her parents: "You're no beauty, and it's too bad that you're such an intellectual," they told her. "But if you become a doctor, no man will ever marry you."
Instead, Mim earned a doctorate in musicology and ran a bookshop until she married at nearly 30, after which she retired into a comfortable idleness.
