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Lily McLemore

NonfictionMilitary History

Ben Blum

Interview by Lily McLemore

On August 7, 2006, a group of elite U.S. Army Rangers, including Alex Blum, who was preparing to deploy to Iraq, participated in a bank heist that was organized by Specialist Luke Elliott Sommer. In the incredibly gripping Ranger Games, Ben Blum attempts to understand how his clean-cut cousin Alex, who had dreamed of being an Army Ranger for his entire life, could be involved in this disastrous crime. What he discovers is a web of lies, alleged brainwashing and disturbing truths about the military, his family and himself.

We asked Ben Blum a few questions about the Army Ranger program, masculinity and how writing this fascinating book ultimately affected his family.

How do you think you would have reported this story if Alex Blum was not your cousin?
The short answer is that I wouldn’t have. I was a computer science graduate student with zero journalistic experience at the time I started corresponding with Alex back in 2007, and Army Rangers scared the crap out of me—let alone Army Rangers who had robbed a bank. Everything I learned about reporting I learned from my early mistakes with Alex: getting too close to a subject, taking a single perspective on an event as definitive, seeking evidence to fit a narrative rather than a narrative to fit the evidence. After the first couple of years, I managed to graduate from Alex’s friend and confidante to something a little closer to a true journalist, but toward the end, I found that even that role was insufficient to the project. Instead of just reporting what I had come to see as entrenched distortions in his perspective, I wanted to change his perspective, to be a kind of a therapist to him. That goes beyond the bounds of what a journalist is supposed to do. But for better or for worse, it makes the book what it is—a lot more intense than a piece of pure reportage could have been.

What was the most surprising thing you learned about the U.S. Army Rangers program?
That it is possible to become an elite Special Operations soldier in the American military, available for assignment to our most sensitive missions, without even a shred of combat experience.

How has this book affected your relationship with Alex Blum?
It put an enormous amount of strain on our relationship for a very long time, but we are now closer than we ever dreamed we’d be. As he put it in a toast at my wedding last year, we’ve laughed together, we’ve cried together, we’ve said “f— you” to each other, and we each consider the other one of our best friends.

Do you feel that America’s cultural beliefs about masculinity and war was a partner in this crime?
Absolutely. It reminds me of the parable that David Foster Wallace told at his famous graduation speech at Kenyon College. An old fish swims by two young fish and says, “Morning boys, how’s the water?” The two young fish swim on, and eventually one leans over to the other and whispers, “What the hell is ‘water’?” For Americans of Alex’s and my generation, the water is war. We breathed it in through our morning cartoons, our toy cowboys and toy guns, the explosion effects on sports shows, the movies we grew up watching, the videogames we played with our friends. Every branch of the military—Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard—has its own Hollywood liaison office dedicated to ensuring that screenplays fit the image they want to convey to the young guys like Alex who watch action movies. If directors don’t play ball, they lose access to military equipment and locations.

Alex Blum held his superiors in the Army in high regard and respect. What do you think was different and so powerful about his relationship with Specialist Luke Elliott Sommer?
Fraternization with underlings is generally frowned upon among Rangers, but Sommer broke this taboo. He was more than a superior to Alex; he was a mentor, a role model. He made Alex feel chosen, deemed worthy of special attention by a member of a higher caste. It spoke to Alex’s ambition to excel.

Luke Elliott Sommer is a strange and complex character. Despite his many flaws and poor decisions, it’s difficult not to see the charismatic and ambitious—if not delusional—Sommer as some sort of genius. After completing this book, what are your feelings about Sommer?
I fear for him. I have come to think of his brain as something like a Lamborghini that lacks first, second, third and reverse. It looks amazing and sounds like a lot of fun to drive, but in practice you’re going to have a hell of a time getting to the grocery store and back. I think Sommer is in fact profoundly disabled, and the great tragedy of it is how hard it is for people to tell—sometimes even for himself. Nobody likes pain, but people who are born without the ability to feel it end up losing fingers and limbs. Sommer seems to lack the ability to feel a certain more abstract but equally life-saving species of pain, the kind that tells you that what you are doing is going to cause harm to yourself and others down the line.

Did your feelings toward the military evolve while writing this book?
Surprisingly enough, I ended the book far more sympathetic to the military than when I began it. Educated, middle-class Americans have grown so insulated from military culture that it tends to look a little strange and scary to them. Ever since Vietnam and the abolition of the draft, our wars have been fought by the rural poor, which makes it particularly easy for urban elites to attach their political queasiness about our recent, ever-more-unjustified wars to the men and women who fight them. But the soldiers I’ve met are amazing people—kind, reflective and unusually well-informed. As in all arenas of life, there is a right and a wrong way to conduct oneself as a soldier, and the majority strive to conduct themselves in the right way.

How has writing this book about your family affected your life?
It has completely transformed it. I used to feel pretty alienated from my family. The men were all big, tough jocks and I was this scrawny math nerd who had no idea how to keep up with their banter. I couldn’t wait to leave home for college. Writing about Alex and the army connected me back to my family culture in a way that I never dreamed possible as a kid. I discovered that there was more love and joy available in these classically male modes of interaction than I had ever understood from outside them, but also a tremendous amount of elided pain. Learning about our family history, particularly the foundational influence of my grandfather’s horrific experiences as a soldier in World War II, taught me a lot about my relatives and myself.

What do you hope for Alex Blum’s future?
I hope he is brave enough to show people his vulnerability, confusion and pain. I hope they see the goodness of his heart and give him the opportunity to show the strength of his character. I hope he starts a family and teaches his own kids how to skate. I hope this book doesn’t upend the impressive life he has managed to build for himself as a convicted felon (no easy feat in America).

You’re a former mathematical prodigy and have just completed a wide-ranging, engrossing book about the military, the nature of loyalty and truth, the complex dynamics of male relationships, bank heists and morality. What’s next for you?
I’m still interested in science, but seven years of thinking about Alex and morality have shattered so many of my old scientific beliefs—most notably, my commitment to materialist determinism. I now find the great and pressing mysteries to be the human ones. I am going to keep trying to make a living as a writer as long as they let me get away with it. My next project will address the psychology of morality, religion and trauma.

You dedicate this book to your grandmother, Oma. Can you tell me a bit about your relationship with her?
Oma is a tough Texan belle who taught me manners, pride and that ineffable quality called grace. So much of Ranger Games is about men, and so much of my childhood was about men, but Oma was, looking back, just as much an influence on our family culture as my grandfather. Alex and I both love her dearly.

 

Author photo by Ned & Aya Rosen

We asked Ben Blum a few questions about the Army Rangers program, masculinity and how writing his fascinating book, Ranger Games ultimately affected his family.
NonfictionHistoryCrafts, Hobbies & Home

Judith Flanders

Interview by Lily McLemore

The Christmas trees, the feasting, the stockings hanging over the fireplace . . . It’s all pretty standard seasonal fare. But where exactly did our beloved Christmas traditions come from? Historian and bestselling author Judith Flanders explores the unexpected sources of the winter holiday in her fascinating and festive Christmas: A Biography. We asked Flanders a few questions about what she discovered during her research. 

I think my favorite tradition I learned about from this book are the Bean Kings, the lucky recipients of a slice of cake with a bean baked into it who were celebrated in medieval Europe and England. Bean kings sound like they were the life of the party! What was your favorite Christmas tradition that you discovered during research?
It probably had to be that boring gifts of underwear have a long history. In 1805, on the great Lewis and Clark expedition, the first expedition to map out the western part of the USA, Captain Lewis gave Lieutenant Clark ‘a present of a Fleeshe Hoserey vest draws & Socks’, with a ‘pr Mockerson’: fleece hosiery, or stockings, and a vest, underpants, socks and moccasins, or slippers.

How much influence do Victorian traditions, rooted in the writings of Washington Irving and Charles Dickens, hold on our current ideas about Christmas?
Victorian traditions did make a lot of difference to the holiday: In particular, I explain in the book why I think it is likely that Washington Irving ‘invented’ Santa Claus, rather than drawing on an old Dutch tradition, as he claimed to have done. Dickens, in turn, read Irving. But the most important Victorian elements were not seasonal. It was railways, urbanization, the press and the mass market, all of which were invented, or flourished, in the 19th century, that took older seasonal traditions and either elaborated them, or reshaped them for the new century. This was what created the Christmas we know today.

Why do you think Christmas is so wrapped up in collective nostalgia, a hearkening back to “the good old days”?
Ultimately, my research showed that Christmas isn’t so much wrapped up in nostalgia, as nostalgia is a major part of the holiday. It is a way of creating a collective illusion that life was once better—an illusion we need, one that lets us believe we can get back to that state once more. Because Christmas has always been about nostalgia, and it was never better at some mythical ‘before’ date. In the 4th century, only 30 years after the first recorded Christmas, an archbishop was already preaching against holiday gluttony. And by 1616, a character in a play was looking back to the good old days when Christmas was really Christmas, nothing like the modern day, he said.

Sounds like (over)eating and (over)drinking have been a part of Christmas since Roman times, before it was even called Christmas. What was your favorite Christmas delicacy you found while researching, or what’s your personal favorite holiday treat?
Actually my favourite thing was not a delicacy at all, but perhaps an anti-delicacy. I’ve always thought Christmas pudding was disgusting, greasy and rich and—well, just ick. So I was pleased to find an 18th-century Swiss traveller who was horrified when he tasted the British ancestor to Christmas pudding, then called plum broth, or plum porridge. He was adamant: you had to be English to like it.

You grew up mostly in Canada, but now live in London. Do you see any major differences between the Christmases of Canada and Britain?
I’m sort of a cheat when it comes to Christmas in life as opposed to on the page. I’m Jewish, and my family only made the most token gestures towards Christmas—we had a tree once or twice, I think, but that was it. So the differences I see are mostly from the outside: It seems to me that in Britain there is more emphasis on the Christmas dinner part of the day, in North America, more on the tree and the decorations. But the one thing I found researching was, it’s not just every country that does it differently: Every family does it differently, and every family believes that their way is the only right way.

As your book makes clear, Christmas has evolved a lot since its roots in Roman revelry. Do you see any transformations for the holiday on the horizon?
Well, in some ways I don’t agree with your question. I think the details of the holiday have changed, because the world has changed, but I think the holiday has from the start been about consumption, and it still is. Before the mass market, and industrialization, most of the consumption was food and drink, while now it’s consumer products. But it’s still consumption.

From carols, which originated in the 16th century, and the Nutcracker ballet to It’s a Wonderful Life and Nat King Cole’s “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” the creative types have always found inspiration in Christmas. What’s your favorite Christmas-themed creative work?
I’ve been a ballet-goer for decades, so my least favourite Christmas pastime is The Nutcracker: I’ve just seen it too often. And I was amazed to realize that Handel’s Messiah was not, until the 20th century, a Christmas tradition at all, but an Easter one. If I had only one Christmas creative work, though, it might just be James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life: I don’t think you can have too many seasonal weepies.

As you point out, Christmas means many things to many different people, from a time of religious celebration to a time for commercial gain. What does it mean for you? Did your views change while writing this book?
I think my great realization when researching the subject was to realize how miraculously chameleon-like Christmas was: how it could be so many different things in so many places to so many different people. That might just be my favorite.

Any Christmas festivities that you’re looking forward to celebrating yourself?
Would I sound too Scrooge-like if I said it was closing my front door and staying home and not talking to anyone? Bah, humbug.

The Christmas trees, the feasting, the stockings hanging over the fireplace . . . It’s all pretty standard Christmas fare. But where exactly did our beloved seasonal traditions come from? Historian and bestselling author Judith Flanders explores the unexpected sources of the winter holiday in her fascinating and festive Christmas: A Biography. We asked Flanders a few questions about what she discovered during her research. 
NonfictionEssays

Pamela Druckerman

Interview by Lily McLemore

In her crackling, honest memoir There Are No Grown-Ups, Pamela Druckerman (Bringing Up Bebé) navigates life, friendship, marriage and parenthood in her 40s while living in Paris and trying to remain (somewhat) sane. We asked Druckerman a few questions about the French approach to aging and coming to terms with the unsettling realization that when it comes down to it, no one really knows what they’re doing. 

What’s the most impressively adult thing you’ve done lately (besides, of course, writing a book!)—something a younger you would never imagine yourself being capable of?
Earlier this month I gave a speech to American college students who were studying abroad in Paris. I explained how studying abroad changed my life, and I offered some advice. The “adultness” of this was partly structural, since I was more than twice their age. But it also came from the fact that I was extracting lessons—and even a few morsels of actual wisdom—from my own experiences. These were insights that I didn’t have when I was younger. It had taken years for them to crystallize. 

Maybe it’s true what the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said: “The first 40 years provide the text, the next 30 provide the commentary.” By your 40s, you have a critical mass of experience, and the distance to look at the same things you’ve seen many times before, but see them differently.  

Looking back, what advice do you wish you’d heeded in your 20s? Do you even think it would have been possible, or, as they say, is youth wasted on the young? 
I wish I’d been more ruthless in my assessments of other people. I should have spent less time fretting about what others thought of me, and more time deciding what I thought of them. One of the joys of the 40s is that your neuroticism—your obsession with yourself and your own issues—declines. You can look at other people more clearly, and spot narcissists before they ruin your life. And if you don’t want to talk to someone, you don’t talk to them.  I also wish I’d realized that practically no one in my peer group would partner up or start having kids before their 30s. I panicked when I wasn't married by 27—the age when my mother got married. I thought I was way behind schedule, and that I wouldn’t catch up. I didn’t realize that the schedule had changed. I really should have Googled it. 

What’s the most surprising thing about being your 40s?
I’m surprised that I actually look like I’m in my 40s. Looking young had always been my superpower. Into my 30s, bartenders asked me for ID. I thought my body wouldn’t know how to look middle-aged, or that I’d have to give it explicit permission. But then people started calling me “madame” instead of “mademoiselle.” And elderly men started to flirt with me. Even more surprising was realizing that I’d changed on the inside, too. I had actually managed to learn and grow a bit. 

How do you think French and American women view aging differently?
The American ideal is to look as young as you can for as long as you can (I had definitely striven for this). Nobody minds looking young in France, either. But the more realistic ideal is to look like the best version of the age that you’re in. (“Trying to look young is the quickest way to look old,” an older French model says.) 

There’s a different sexual narrative for women, too. In America, the 40s can seem like a woman’s last viable years before she plunges into the sexual abyss, never to be heard from again. When I turned 45, a friend asked me, “Do you feel like you have five years left before no one wants to sleep with you anymore?” 

The American statistics are pretty grim. A third of American women in their 50s haven’t had sex in the past year, and nearly half of women in their 60s haven’t. The 70s are practically celibate. (Men fare much better at all ages.)

I thought this decline was sad but inevitable. But then I saw that the French have a different story. Most people here also believe that younger women are sexier, and French women do have less sex as they get older. But it’s a gentle slope, not an abyss. I see couples in their 60s perusing lingerie racks together, and there are plum movie roles for older women. I interviewed older Frenchwomen for the book and heard some amazing stories. It turns out that what I thought was biologically inevitable was actually culturally determined. Knowing this feels liberating.   

You write about the idea of being an expert, and that perhaps men are more easily viewed as such—you say you once had “mistaken being a grown-up for being a man.” How do you think men’s experience of aging and adulthood differs from women’s?
I’ve always been comforted by the idea that there are people—real grown-ups—running things. They know more than me, and they make life seem orderly, empirical and safe. If I’m an expert, it means that I'm one of those people. It’s existentially a bit scary, since even though I stand behind my work, I know my own limitations.  

I’m not sure this feeling qualifies as “imposter syndrome.” But I’ve been surprised by how many accomplished women have some version of this. They say they’re not really qualified for the jobs they have, and they're afraid of being found out. One Ivy League-trained professor told me she’d absolutely understand if she doesn’t get tenure at her university, because she doesn’t really deserve it, and her colleagues are much smarter than she is. Whereas a male professor roughly the same age described the moment in graduate school when he realized that he could perform the same intellectual feats as his own professors. He felt ready to join their ranks. I’ve seen studies in which men overestimate their expertise, and women underestimate theirs. The two genders should probably meet somewhere in the middle. 

You write about being considered a parenting expert after the success of Bringing Up Bebé, but feeling uncomfortable being labeled as such. What do you consider yourself an expert in? 
By your 40s, if you’ve been honing one skill for several decades, you really do get better at it. I still find writing excruciatingly hard, but these days, after many rewrites, I can usually get to something decent. 

You write, “When I meet a pretty mother from my son’s school, I no longer think, in a pointless loop, ‘She’s so pretty, she’s so pretty, she’s prettier than me.’” Instead, age has allowed you to hone your ability to decode and perceive people for who they really are. You’ve come to the realization that “that’s what the forties are: they’re a journey from ‘everyone hates me’ to ‘they don’t really care.’” How did you make the switch? 
Another advantage of becoming less neurotic is that it’s easier to understand what’s going on. It’s amazing how much you can learn by just paying careful attention to other people and noting patterns. In my 40s, I notice what others care about, what their strengths and weaknesses are and—crucially—whether they have a sense of humor. I also realize that they usually aren’t thinking much about me. 

It’s a relief to suddenly see more clearly. The world has become less perplexing and more pleasurable. I haven’t suddenly become the Buddha, but I’m in less of a fog. 

In this state it’s easier to make friends. Instead of feeling isolated and different, you realize how much you have in common with other people, and you can trust that you’re having shared experiences. 

Aging gracefully seems to be a trick mastered by French women, who are “not in permanent mourning for a previous version of themselves.” Do you have any tips on how to adopt this attitude?
I think this involves accentuating and enjoying the qualities that are specific to you, rather than striving for cookie-cutter perfection. As women get older, they look like they have a story. The French adjustment is to treat that story not as unwelcome baggage, but as part of a woman’s specificity and allure. “The beauty is to see the humanity of someone,” a Parisian beautician told me. “We don’t want to look like we come out of a box. We’re not frozen, we’re alive.”

What’s next for you? Do you have any thoughts, fears or big plans for 50?
I spent much of my 40s trying to chronicle what the 40s are like. It’s a very meta way to age. I’m looking forward to experiencing life in a slightly less examined way. Though of course I’d also like to write another book. I can’t help taking a few notes. 

You’re a collector of rules and pithy phrases like, “Only friends can disappoint” and “Dress British, think Yiddish.”  Your litmus test for their worthiness is if you can imagine uttering them as your last words. Do you any last words for us?
I’ll leave you with a French expression: “Old pots make the best soup.” Though for the record, I don’t qualify as an old pot yet.

 

Photo credit Dmitry Kostyukov

In her new memoir There Are No Grown-Ups, Pamela Druckerman navigates life, friendship, marriage and parenthood in her 40s while living in Paris. We asked Druckerman a few questions about the French approach to aging and coming to terms with the unsettling realization that really, no one knows what they’re doing. 
Cookbooks

Todd Richards

Interview by Lily McLemore

James Beard-nominated chef Todd Richards recently published his first cookbook, Soul, which is our Top Pick in Cooking for June. Soul celebrates Richards’ ever-evolving relationship with soul food while pushing past stereotypical ideas about its definition. For Richards, soul food is deeply personal and far from narrowly defined: The endpapers of Soul feature photos of Richards and his family, and the recipes encompass a myriad of influences, from his mother’s love of Chinese food to a childhood predilection for fried pies. 

BookPage editor Lily McLemore sat down with Richards to chat about his new book before joining him for a celebratory dinner prepared by Richards and his friend chef Sean Brock at Brock’s Nashville restaurant, Husk. Click here for Richards’ recipe for Grilled Peach Toast with Pimiento Cheese. 

Lily McLemore: How has it all been going so far?
Todd Richards: So the book came out three weeks ago, and it’s been really amazing, the response—and not only the response, just people understanding the perspective that I’m coming from. And it’s a gorgeous book. It is as beautiful as it is handsome, which I think is really important for a good cookbook. That you can have a lot of this masculine feel with all this wonderful feminist beauty inside of it. Turning the first page and seeing my mom there. . . . Then, just, the judgment of my peers, whom I highly respect, who are telling me, “Man we needed this book for a very long time.”

I was looking at these pictures from your childhood in the book, and I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about some of the dishes you ate growing up in Chicago.
The book is a little biographical when it comes to the actual dishes in there. We started with things like traditionally cooked collard greens and then progressed forward. My mom had a love for Chinese food. There was a Chinese place on 87th and Jeffery, and she’d get what’s called yakamein. It’s basically noodles, broth, two slices of pork belly, a soft-boiled egg and scallions. My dad, in his frugality, said, if we ordered something out, anything in the refrigerator that was leftover had to put out on the table as well. So having collard greens on the table with that dish, and then you see the collard green ramen in the book—this is a dish I was eating when I was 5, 6 years old. The way that I interpreted it is a little bit different because of my background in cooking, but it’s the exact same dish I was eating as a kid.

Then there’s other dishes like the Blueberry Fried Pie. Growing up in Chicago with the Hostess factory, that whole Hostess culture—tearing that paper off and then eating it, and all the icing on the packets. Having a great fried pie, for me, is like being a kid all over again. I interpret this recipe a little bit differently: Instead of cooking the blueberries to mush, you make the liquid and then you put the blueberries inside of it. So when you bite into that fried pie, the blueberries burst in your mouth, you know? You get all this really fresh blueberry flavor that’s not overly sweet in the fried pie. It’s just really taking my childhood memories and progressing them to fine-dining dishes, and then writing a cookbook that I think everyone can enjoy.

Can you tell me a bit about how you got from Chicago to fine dining and now being a James Beard Award-nominated chef and restaurant owner?
My dad worked in downtown Chicago, at a place called Montgomery Ward, which no longer exists. He worked from eight at night to eight in the morning, Thursday, Friday and Saturday night. Some nights my mom would cook for him, but some nights we took my dad downtown to work, and we’d eat. So our family ate out constantly. I remember we went to Lawry’s steakhouse in Chicago. The chef came out with the big old hat on and opened up that prime rib cart: prime rib, lamb, mashed potatoes, creamed spinach, green beans, horse radish sauce, au jus and bread. Just in the cart! You open it up, and it’s like this whole glory of things! So my life has always been around food.

In the book, you write about the broad definition of soul food for you. It beautifully meanders across influences and across the world. Did that fluidity come naturally to you?
I think soul food is a broad definition. Just like people say Southern or Chinese. You look at Chinese food—you can go Szechuan, you can go to many different regions in China. When you say soul food, it’s really a vast difference from the South to the North to the West Coast, how that’s interpreted. I think in the South, Southern and soul run the same gamut. When you get farther north, you see different influences come in. If you get to Florida, you’ll see the Caribbean influences come in. If you go to the West Coast and see soul food, it’s way more vegetable-focused than it is on the East Coast. And it has a lot of Latin influences and Asian influences as well.

So I think I just pulled all the stories that I knew about food together, then spoke about it through my family’s lens and then how it translated to fine dining.

You include really wonderful pieces of food history in your book. Was it important for you to pull in history?
I think so. I don’t think you can talk about soul food and not understand the history of it. That term started in the 1950s and ’60s, and there isn’t really a lot of modern context out there. That’s what I really wanted to do: show the modern context of where that food came from. And to give a brief history of it, because I’m not a revisionist of history, and there’s some much better historians out there than myself that have done it and are doing it, like Adrian E. Miller, of course, Michael W. Twitty, Toni Tipton-Martin. They’re great historians of it. I wanted to show it in a modern context. Not only where it came from and paying homage to that but really how vast it is, and how far we can explore it and make it even more delicious than what it is.

Todd Richards grilling with Sean Brock at Husk in Nashville, Tennessee.

You’re based right now in Atlanta. Do you ever think about expanding outside of the South?
You know, the government won’t allow cloning yet, but if the government allowed me to clone myself, I would think about it quite more seriously. I do have a soft place to go back to Chicago and do a restaurant there. There are places I’ve dreamed about going, but I think the reality is, I won’t do it at this point in time. I’m not a young person anymore. But you know, I’m saying all that, and if someone called from New York or LA right now and said, “Hey do you want to do a restaurant out there?” I’d probably do it. [Laughs.]

Is there any particular person or chefs that really had an influence on you?
Yeah, that would be Chef Evans. Chef Darryl Evans. I met him at what is now the Four Seasons Hotel—before that it was the Occidental Grand Hotel—in Atlanta. He was the first African-American chef to compete in the Culinary Olympics. Four gold medals, two silver medals. They were so shocked that he made it to the team that the culinary federation made him go to Germany and redo the entire thing in front of them.

When was this?
Late ’80s, early ’90s. He was a very brilliant chef. I think he’s probably one of the most unsung chefs, especially for African-American chefs. Unfortunately he passed away a few years ago. I think he’s really unsung, because out of that kitchen came nine or 10 African-American chefs who are either exec-chef level, chef-owner level or something like that.

But I pull influences from all over. I pull influences from when I was a kid, with my grandmother watching the whole Saturday lineup of cooking shows: “Yan Can Cook,” Julia Child, Justin Wilson, Jacques Pépin. That’s what I’m saying. Food has been such a critical part of my life—every memory about my family is about food.

In the book, you’re really pushing against stereotypes. I was wondering if you could talk a little more about that.
At one of my first jobs after Blue Ribbon Grill that I applied for, the chef de cuisine asked me, “What are you gonna do? Come in and cook soul food? Fried chicken, mac and cheese? No body wants that here.” And it put me in a place—like, I know this is delicious. Why in the hell would nobody want it? But if he’s the chef, and he’s saying nobody wants it, then maybe I shouldn’t be cooking this.

It wasn’t until about 2004, 10 years later, that I was at the Oak Room in Louisville, Kentucky. We had a tasting menu, and we’re doing a lot of the great dishes of the South and everything. But at some point someone has to be telling their story, and I know it’s a great story because my parents were great people. Before, I didn’t have one single dish with watermelon because of the stereotyped caricature of watermelon in our country’s history. And that was the first time I ever did a watermelon dish on a menu. Middle of summer, watermelon is beautiful. It’s versatile, you can juice it, you can puree it, you can compress it, which is a modernist technique. So we did a whole tasting of watermelon, and we used every single part. We pickled the rind, we took the seeds and dehydrated them and mixed them with hibiscus powder so we had a spice. It was a way to just throw away the stereotypes and embrace how delicious damn watermelon is in the middle of the summer when it’s 100 degrees outside! It’s the perfect food for that! And that to me has really became the emphasis—not being shameful of my culture’s food, but embracing it and telling the world how great it is, standing on a chair, beating my chest, saying, “This food is delicious!” If you don’t want to pay for it, that’s your problem, not mine.

I noticed that you included soundtracks with the suggested menus. Can you tell me about that connection between food and music for you?
People ask me that question all the time. I say, “Well, you know what, have you ever eaten in a silent restaurant?” Can you imagine that? You can hear every plate clinking and all that. But cooking is a rhythmic art. When you chop, you don’t chop unsyncopated; all this stuff is a rhythm. And I wanted to give people a sense of what my rhythm was in writing this book.

Food is a temporary art. You put it on there, you consume it, it always changes. Music always stays the same in the sense that, once it’s recorded and it’s out there, you can listen to that same track over and over. Food is not that way. Things change too much. A tomato is not always the same size. It’s just not. Everything changes in nature. Music stays. It’s an art form that you can consume in the same manner all the time.

You mention that you love the radish so much that you got a tattoo of it. I was wondering what your favorite ingredient to work with is?
You know, it changes all the time. We grow a lot of food at home.

Oh really! What do you grow?
We have tomatoes, peppers, onions, jalapenos, cucumbers, ground cherries, tomatillos, watermelon, fig, Meyer lemons, of course all the herbs in the world, and potatoes. And all this is in a three-bedroom town home.

No deer around to eat all your stuff!
No, no. Occasional rabbit, but my wife won’t let me kill it. [Laughs.]

He’s a friend!
I guess. But I’m like, if we ever get hungry! [Laughs.] But so, it really depends. I like walking to the farmer’s market and talking to the farmers. That’s what inspires me with food. I’m definitely a seasonal guy. More so, that’s the way my grandmother cooked when I was a kid.

You write about the often-overlooked meat cuts. Is there any piece of offal that you wish Americans in general would embrace more wholeheartedly?
I mean, if you want to get into the most soul food way, chitterlings. My sister makes really, really good chitterlings. I like them fried. Or you can julienne them really fine and fold them into something. But offal-wise, I love sweetbreads. My doctor wouldn’t like it too much, but I could eat sweetbreads everyday. When it gets to chicken, the liver, the gizzards, the heart are some of the best.

I feel like at some point the offal is going to cost more than the chicken breast.
Well, look at ox tail. It’s a perfect example of that. Ox tail used to be 69 cents a pound. Now ox tails are $4.49-5.99 a pound. I mean, I understand it from a scale—there’s only one tail per cow, you know!

That’s true!
I can get it from that standpoint. My favorite, though, is lamb heart. Lamb heart tartare is so delicious. It’s not gamey like other parts of the lamb can be. The heart—just, nice small dices of it. A great taco to me? Lengua taco. Beef tongue tacos. Those are the best tacos. Tender, when you crunch into it you get the cilantro . . . I stopped eating red meat a long time ago, but that lengua taco? Man, that’s good.

So what’s your hope for the future of soul food?
My hope is that more chefs embrace cooking it. That from a value standpoint, it gets to the same point as French food. Soul food takes some of the longest cooking time to make it really taste delicious. Collards greens on the first day are great. Collard greens on the second day are even better. Collard greens on the third day? I mean, you would smack somebody to get a bowl.

It’s just—how much skill does it take to make chitterlings taste good? It takes a lot of skill and know-how to even get them cleaned right. So we have a food that takes the longest to cook, but we charge the least amount for. It’s not a sustainable model moving forward.

What’s next for you?
I keep asking myself that. I know I need to get back to my restaurants! Oh, my goodness. But opening more restaurants, writing more, trying to find a good outlet for a show that I want to do based on the book. That would be my ultimate goal in two years: to have a show done based off the book. And really just expand the conversation around it. And to mentor more chefs. That’s number one, everyday. If people saw my phone, most of the time I’m talking to young chefs. I spend a lot of my day answering questions.

I’m very excited about the dinner tonight!
Yeah, so am I. I don’t get to see Sean [Brock] that often. Years ago we used to hang out with each other a lot more. But now he’s busy with his empire, and I’m trying to build an empire. But we go back a long way. We always stood up for each other, because we were always doing things far outreaching what people thought we should do. Him coming out of Appalachia, me coming from Chicago, we always modernize food, and we always went way back to pull things up to push things way, way forward. I think that’s how we became friends.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Soul.

In late May, Atlanta chef Todd Richards published his first cookbook, Soul, which celebrates his evolving relationship with Soul food. For Richards, Soul food is far from narrowly defined—it encompasses a myriad of influences and regions, from his mother’s love of Chinese food to a childhood predilection for fried pies. It’s also deeply personal.
NonfictionEssaysArts & Culture

Alice Bolin

Interview by Lily McLemore

In her debut collection of essays, Dead Girls, Alice Bolin explores America’s undeniable fascination with murdered, maligned and silenced women. Here, we ask her about serial killers, Britney Spears and LA freeways. 

What do you think is the driving force behind America’s obsession with dead girls?
There are probably too many forces to get into. The noir Dead Girls are like contemporary America’s version of Catholic virgin martyrs, whose bodies were also the site of both veneration and violence, and whose deaths often sprang from male hunger and rage. These are ambiguous icons. Dead Girls are the most potent evidence we have of our culture’s misogyny—but their prevalence also seems like a way to police women’s behavior, a warning that theirs could be our fate. The popular obsession with dead women is symptomatic of America’s deeper feelings and biases toward women. What do you think some of these deeper feelings are? I think it probably says more about our feelings about men—the way their primacy in our society bulldozes everyone else’s desire, success and freedom. Violence against women is startlingly common. Women are so often collateral damage in men’s refusal to deal with failure or frustration. Many noir stories take this everyday misogyny and make it about—who else?—men. Fascinatingly twisted and broken murderers take helpless victims while stoic detectives face the evil of humanity by avenging the Dead Girl. Women’s daily desires and fears are often completely absent in these stories.

The Dead Girl is everywhere, from “Twin Peaks” to popular fiction and “Dateline.” Can you give a general character sketch of the titular Dead Girl?
I would say in general a Dead Girl is a pretty, white teenager who is either mysteriously missing or horribly murdered, though those demographic markers vary. Most importantly, the Dead Girl captures the popular imagination—the Dead Girl obsession is absolutely related to what Gwen Ifill famously called “missing white woman syndrome” when discussing the ways that media coverage of white female victims took precedence over every other victim of violent crime. These dead women have more in common with glamorous poster girls than “characters”—we don’t know the Black Dahlia or Natalee Holloway or a victim on “Law and Order: SVU” in anything other than smiling snapshots or gruesome crime scene images.

Why do you think there is a tendency to mythologize serial killers, to make them seems almost supernatural and hyper-intelligent, when in reality, they are, as Jess Walter writes, “the kind of broken, weak-minded loser who preys on women on the fringe of society”?
The myth that serial killers are superhumanly charming, manipulative, intelligent and cruel keeps us from finding more systemic reasons for why many men have gotten away with brutalizing and killing women over and over again for years—law enforcement’s attitudes towards both marginalized women and middle class white men, for instance. It also makes one feel less guilty about our very basic fascination with hideous violence.

Can you explain the evolution of your understanding of the Britney Spears song “. . . Baby One More Time”?
“. . . Baby One More Time” came out when I was in fifth grade, and I swear I had this weird, immediate sense that it had changed the paradigm of pop music. The song’s lyrics are opaque, but its sonics are unforgettable; the images in the music video are so vivid, and yet they do very little to illuminate the song’s meaning. I was 25 when this repeating lyric in the song struck me: “My loneliness is killing me.” What a strange and yet appropriate thing for a teeny-bopper to sing! Loneliness is one of my abiding interests in this life, since we all go through it, but we go through it alone. It made me think deeper about Britney and her genius.

What about your relationship with the writing of Joan Didion?
Didion is one of my heroes, as she has been for a generation of women writers. I essentially moved to Los Angeles because of her. I wanted to absorb some of the brainy, sun-soaked alienation she traded in. I have evolved from simple hero worship with Didion, though, especially in writing this book, where I have had to confront some of the problems I see in her approach. I always loved her as a writer of place, but her California mythmaking is attractive because it calcifies a complex, changing place to an idea. Her stubborn romanticism about California is interesting because in general she is so skeptical, which is probably her strength as a writer; in her analyses, she takes very little for granted. But when you are skeptical of everything, it is difficult to make moral judgments. The concerns of the rich and poor, the powerful and powerless are all equally hollow and ridiculous.

Do you see parallels between media’s coverage of attractive murdered women and the coverage of female celebrity icons?
Yes! That is one reason why I chose to think about those living icons—Britney Spears, Joan Didion, Patty Hearst—in the same book as the dead ones. To me this is about that damaging, amoral concept of glamour, where women are valued for being sexy, stylish and mysterious, and a woman can be equally glamorous walking a red carpet or, as Patty Hearst did, spraying Crenshaw Boulevard with bullets. There is a very cruel glamour to being a Dead Girl, which is why the #deadgirl hashtag on Instagram is filled with selfies from living, if spooky, women. Being valued for your loveliness and silence, for the mystery you represent, is not limited to Dead Girls, and is a tendency I think living women should be wary of playing to.

The only thing I think about when I think about Los Angeles (a place I’ve never been) is freeways. Didion writes that the experience of driving in LA is a “kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway.” What’s your relationship to LA’s famed roadways?
I grew up in Idaho, where, as my dad so often said, “There are no roads.” It is one of two states without a north-south interstate highway, and much of the state is wilderness. I had never experienced driving on freeways like the ones in Los Angeles before I moved there—like, ever—and had to learn the rules of driving on them by Googling it. But because I grew up in such an isolated place, driving for hours and hours to get somewhere feels very natural to me. Driving across LA on a congested freeway felt like an extension of, say, driving the lonely stretches of I-90 in eastern Montana. Nevertheless I walked and rode the bus far more than anyone else I knew in LA, for financial reasons and because if I moved my car there was always a chance I wouldn’t be able to find another parking place. Those alternative modes of transportation were just another dimension to the impossibility of getting anywhere in LA and more public opportunities to listen to music on my iPod and cry.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Dead Girls.

Photo credit Justin Davis

In her debut collection of essays, Dead Girls, Alice Bolin explores America’s undeniable fascination with murdered, maligned and silenced women. Here, we ask her about serial killers, Britney Spears and LA freeways.
NonfictionMemoirEssays

Robert Anthony Siegel

Interview by Lily McLemore

In his deeply personal and compassionate collection of essays, Criminals, Robert Anthony Siegel explores his unusual upbringing as the son of a charming, erratic criminal defense attorney, whose ethically dubious practices eventually send him to prison, and a culturally eloquent mother who was always reaching for more. Siegel’s writing is breathtaking—I had to take a walk around the block after reading the crushing, beautiful title essay.

I asked Siegel, who lives in North Carolina with his family, a few questions about his parents, the Hells Angels and the unexpected solace he found in Eastern traditions.

What was the most surprising or challenging part of writing this book?
There were a lot of surprises. The first was just the fact that I was writing a memoir at all. I’ve always thought of myself as a private person. But then the second surprise came very quickly after that, which is that I’m actually no more private than anyone else, just way more ashamed of myself.

I’m not sure either of those two surprises would matter much without the third, which is that there’s really nothing to be ashamed of. My family and I made a stupid hash of things, just like a lot of other people on this planet. The sense that this was all so very shameful, that I had to protect us with my silence—really, I was just frightened of everything I would have to feel if I ever tried to tell our story: anger, sorrow, forgiveness, and of course the hardest thing of all, love.

Do you think it’s possible to truly know your parents? Would anyone really even want to?
I sometimes feel that thinking about one’s parents is really just a way of thinking about oneself in disguise. But that’s what makes it such an important thing to do.

How accurate do you think the opening lines of Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” are?
I’ve always loved Larkin, but I don’t think that poem is about its first line. If you look at the poem as a whole, it’s really about the way pain is transferred down from one generation to the next. It revolves around a moment of compassionate insight, when the poet realizes that the harm his parents caused him was rooted in the suffering they themselves experienced as children.

But I don’t share Larkin’s conclusion, his wish to stay aloof from life. When we had our firstborn, Jonah, I couldn’t believe they were letting us leave the hospital with that beautiful little creature. Didn’t they know we knew nothing? That baby care books scared us? But a voice inside my head kept whispering, Jonah will show you how. Just listen to Jonah. If you listen to him, everything will be all right. And it was.

Growing up, your family had a fraught relationship with food, especially your father, who “believed that eating would protect us from sorrow.” Can you tell me more about how food factored into your family’s dynamic?
Food was a form of comfort, something that would make us feel a little better, at least temporarily, when we felt sad or lost or disappointed in each other. It was also something we could give to each other, a way of showing love, and something we could share, a way of experiencing connection. And it was aspirational, a form of self-transformation—we could imagine ourselves differently in a French restaurant, eating escargot with those long delicate forks.

But my father would sometimes go on eating binges that lasted for days. He seemed helpless to stop, but it also felt as if he was wielding his eating as a kind of weapon, and that the rest of us were being held hostage, a captive audience to something that we didn’t fully understand.

Your memoir beautifully recounts your growing realization as an adolescent that the parents you adore are, in fact, also flawed humans. Do you think the parent-child relationship is inevitably set up for disappointment, or is it just continually evolving?
Oh, I vividly remember the comfort of thinking my parents were magical, and that I was privileged to be at the very center of the universe. And looking back, I can still see how a little kid might draw such a conclusion. My father was the kind of criminal defense lawyer who wore cowboy boots and a beard and drove to court on a motorcycle. My mother was a lawyer, too, but gave it up to take us kids to the symphony and ballet, all the things she thought necessary to a real education.

Of course, what I see now is that my belief in them was driven by a sense of their underlying fragility, the fear that they might fall apart and then there would be nobody to take care of us. The period when my father came under investigation and I started to see the cracks in our façade was the most painful of my life. It felt as if I were cracking. But I don’t believe that kind disillusionment is a necessary part of growing up. On the contrary.

Your father represented the Hells Angels, and was careful to cast them as bumbling “characters” instead of dangerous figures, and he took you to the clubhouse regularly. Has your understanding of your father’s work changed given your adult knowledge of the Hells Angels’ white nationalist connections and today’s political climate?
I think we were always secretly uneasy about our relationship to the clients, Hells Angels included. They were criminals and did bad things we ourselves would never do. We didn’t want to be tainted by them, or feel responsible for what they did. At the same time, they were the source of everything special about us, including our money, and we wanted them to love us and need us, like we needed them.

The way we elided that contradiction was humor. In the jokes we told each other at home, we made the clients look harmless and silly, and we made our own participation in the situation feel ironic, a kind of tongue-in-cheek performance that would never have any real-world consequences.

What strikes me now, looking back, is how that kind of joking bled into the rest of our lives without anyone even noticing. We started using it among ourselves whenever we were mean to each other or failed each other in some way. Turning the situation into a joke prevented the other person from expressing any sense of hurt and erased our own sense of responsibility. The interesting thing is that the Angels used much the same strategy to talk about themselves. Just watch their self-produced documentary, Hells Angels Forever, and you’ll see what I mean: It keeps switching rhetorical modes between threat and joke. Cross us and we’ll kill you. No, just kidding! And of course, that kind of rhetorical strategy has gone mainstream now, from Neo-Nazis and racist internet trolls to our elected representatives.

You write that you are from a “family of endomorphs,” and your family was shocked by your interest in judo. Why do you think judo became such a passion for you?
If you’re not familiar with the sport, go to the internet and find a highlights reel from one of the big international competitions and you’ll understand: Judo is exquisite, a kind of human fireworks. And it’s a powerful form of self-cultivation, too: The little I know about bravery and resilience, I learned from judo.

But in my case, there were confused motives from the very start, and that’s the part I wanted to write about here. I think I wanted judo to take away my fear and my loneliness, and cure my sense that something was wrong with me. That was asking too much.

Your mother was particularly interested in being “cultured,” and you were drawn to Eastern traditions such as Taoism and judo, and you have lived in Japan and Taiwan. Why do you think Japan holds such a fascination for you?
Oh, that question has many, many levels to it. If you’ve ever been to Asia, then you know what it’s like to step off the plane and find the English language gone, even the Roman alphabet gone, an entirely new set of rules in place. It’s more than a little scary, but also incredibly thrilling.

On a deeper level, I think I had a secret wish to remake myself: to stop being me and start being somebody who came from an ancient culture and a highly nuanced civilization that offered clear rules about how to treat other people and how to make sense of life. Of course, that was a fantasy. As far as I can tell, everyone on this planet is utterly lost. But even with that understanding, I always feel better in Asia. It makes me present in the moment in a way I can’t always manage elsewhere.

What’s next for you?
Well, I’ve written the one story I was never supposed to tell, and the result is that I’m feeling a tremendous sense of liberation. Suddenly, everything seems possible. So, the short answer is that I want to write as much as I can, with all the daring that I can find.

Author photo by Jonah Siegel

In his deeply personal and compassionate collection of essays, Criminals, Robert Anthony Siegel explores his unusual upbringing as the son of a charming, erratic criminal defense attorney, whose ethically dubious practices eventually send him to prison, and a culturally eloquent mother who was always reaching for more. I asked Siegel a few questions about his family, the Hells Angels and the unexpected solace he found in Eastern traditions.
NonfictionMemoir

Camas Davis

Interview by Lily McLemore

Camas Davis cares deeply about the integrity of animals’ lives. She is also a butcher. In her beautifully written memoir, Killing It, Davis makes it clear that these two aspects of her life can peacefully coexist. Davis’ lucid, striking prose recounts a life-altering journey that began when, directionless and brokenhearted, she booked a flight to France with the last of her funds to spend seven weeks learning how to be a butcher in Gascony.

I met up with Davis at an airy coffee shop in Portland, Oregon, where she now runs the Portland Meat Collective, a school where Davis and various chefs and butchers teach classes about responsible meat consumption. Using animals sourced from local and trustworthy farmers dedicated to raising animals humanely, the collective instructs the curious on slaughter, butchery and cooking practices.

But the road to the Portland Meat Collective was a crooked one for Davis. Growing up in rural Oregon, Davis regularly went hunting and fishing with her father and grandfather, both avid outdoorsmen. “I wasn’t squeamish about dead fish or guts or plucking feathers from ducks,” she says. “It was just a part of how I thought about the world.” In her teens, however, the hunting and fishing fell by the wayside, and she eventually became a magazine editor and entered a long-term relationship with the man she thought she would marry.

“In my late 20s, early 30s, I was very orthodox. I worked for magazines, that was what I did, that was my career. I was going to do it forever.” And then it all fell apart. After leaving her relationship, she lost her job as a magazine editor in Portland. Davis was despondent, but she also realized that she was now free to do whatever she wanted, and what she truly longed for was authenticity—not to just write about the genuine article, but to live it.

It was then that she decided to return to her childhood connection to land, life and death by exploring butchery. “I’ve sort of been fascinated with it for years, as a food writer,” she says. “I was always very excited to work on stories about butchers or about chefs who did butchery, or even just a cut of meat. For some reason, that subject matter felt like it had more of a story than a tomato—which is not true. A tomato has as much of an interesting story as anything else. But I guess the story of the tomato is much more accessible, and I’m always the person that’s like, ‘I want the inaccessible story.’”

Staying with Kate Hill—an American living in France who hosts travelers on gastronomic journeys—on her compound in Gascony, Davis ventured out to find the inaccessible. She went to work for the Chapolard family on their farm, and it was with them that she found something she felt was truly authentic. The Chapolards raise their own pigs on grain they grow themselves, and they own a nearby co-op slaughterhouse. The family gathers together to butcher the animals, and they turn every part of the pigs into hams, loins and the more obscure delicacies that Americans balk at: head cheese, blood sausage, trotters. They then sell the products at market. Davis was enamored with their practices, but she doesn’t romanticize it.

“I think, generally, we’re weirdly afraid of food.”

“There’s so much about the disappearance of the agrarian way in modern times. It’s now becoming this myth, this caricature,” she says. “There’s definitely this sort of nostalgic ideal of what a butcher is.” Davis makes it clear that there’s not much about butchery that is charming. “I really struggle with that in the work that I do. I never want to give the impression that any of this is easy—that it’s easy to kill an animal, or that it’s easy to raise good meat, or that it’s easy to sell the whole animal.” But Davis is committed to bringing meat to the table that comes from animals that lived good lives and died as humanely as possible. It’s a serious matter, and Davis is a serious, deeply curious woman who is driven to poke at what others find unappealing.

Like pig brains, for example. In Killing It, Davis reflects upon the brain from a pig’s skull that she’s just cleaved open: “So much of what we do is in the service of keeping opposing ideas at bay inside ourselves. Isn’t this what we’re doing when we eat meat without taking part in the process that brings it to our tables, without ever being required to stare back at the animal that made that meat possible?”

To take part in this process is to grapple with a uniquely American wariness of food, in particular raw meat. “I think, generally, we’re weirdly afraid of food [in America]. We’re afraid of what it will do to us, we’re afraid of how to use it in the kitchen, we’re afraid of where it comes from. And yet, we don’t really do anything about that fear.”

Davis doesn’t shy away from that fear; she seeks it out and confronts it. She begins her memoir by recounting a pig slaughter, watching the life drain out of a 700-pound sow. “There’s a lot of assumptions we make about what that moment [of death] is like,” Davis explains, “and some of those assumptions are correct. It can be gruesome. It can be like horribly haphazard. It can be mechanized and scary. But it doesn’t have to be.”

Davis surmises that a large part of Americans’ unease toward meat is ultimately wrapped up in the big fear: death. Davis wants to inspect that fear, handle it and understand the whole bloody mess of it. “Everything I’m writing about in this book about [the] death of animals for food is really just a larger metaphor for how we think about death in general, and the ways in which we hide all of that.”

When asked about her favorite cut of meat, Davis’ answer comes as no surprise. “I tend to like the cuts that no one else likes. . . . They tend to be cuts that you have to cook for a long time or smoke or grill on indirect heat. The complex cuts.” In that same spirit, Killing It puts uncomfortable, complex truths out on the table, no matter what they are, and digs in.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Cheryl Juetten.

Camas Davis cares deeply about the integrity of animals’ lives. She is also a butcher. In her beautifully written memoir, Killing It, Davis makes it clear that these two aspects of her life can peacefully coexist. Davis’ lucid, striking prose recounts a life-altering journey that began when, directionless and brokenhearted, she booked a flight to France with the last of her funds to spend seven weeks learning how to be a butcher in Gascony.

NonfictionSelf-Help

Mary Pipher

Interview by Lily McLemore

Psychologist Mary Pipher’s 1994 book, Reviving Ophelia, was a revolutionary exploration of the psychology of teenage girls, and in her inspiring new book, Women Rowing North, she considers the psychological effects of aging on women. Women face many challenges as they age: misogyny, ageism, loss and physical changes. Yet Pipher shows that most older women are more content than their younger selves. Pipher offers warm, empathetic guidelines for navigating aging and for recognizing its unexpected gifts. Here, Pipher answers a few questions about her new book.

Can you tell me about why you decided to write this book?
I always write about something that I need to understand. For example, I wrote about teenage girls when I had an unhappy, teenage daughter and many troubled and angry adolescent clients. I wrote about refugees after Lincoln became an official refugee resettlement community with 54 languages in our schools.

I am particularly attracted to topics in which the cultural messaging is very different from my own experience. I want to explore that disconnection. To me, writing is the deepest form of thinking.

What’s one message you would like to convey to women with this book?
That happiness is both a choice and a set of skills and that with the right attitudes, we can make everything workable. Yes, everything.

I feel like many women today look toward aging with dread and anxiety. What’s something you wish you could have told your younger self about aging?
We now have research that shows that older women are the happiest people of all demographic groups. I wish I had known that earlier. I thought I was peaking in happiness in my 20s, a time that, in retrospect, wasn’t all that happy for me. Many women have expressed how surprised they were by the richness and joy of this life stage.

What’s an example of something you find joy in now that you didn’t when you were younger?
I actually like almost the exact same things I did when I was 10 years old. I love reading, swimming, being outdoors, and my friends and family. During the years I was a working mother, I didn’t have much time for these pleasures, but now I can once again spend much of my time doing these things.

Your groundbreaking 1994 book, Reviving Ophelia, examines the reasons—from unrealistic beauty standards to media’s portrayal of sexuality—behind the growing number of teenage girls developing depression, eating disorders and low self-esteem. Do you think this trend among adolescent girls shares any similarities with the struggles aging women face?
Both age groups on the cusp of great changes. Because of the tidal wave of experiences coming our way, both adolescent girls and older women need to expand our coping capacities and grow our moral imaginations. We also face a culture that sees us in stereotypes that don’t match with our own experiences. We are searching for new ways to understand ourselves and the complicated situations we are experiencing. Both stages are catalytic for great growth.

What do you think are some of the biggest societal challenges women face as they age?
Many women face financial issues, especially around health care. We also are likely to experience the loss of our friends, parents, siblings and partners. By the time we are 70, most of us have experienced some health problems and some collisions with a culture that doesn’t value us because we are old.

When I told my women friends I was writing a book about older women, they would say, “I’m not old.” What they meant was their view of themselves did not fit the cultural stereotypes for older women. They weren’t grumpy, depressed or decrepit. Instead they felt vibrant and deeply engaged with life.

One of the takeaways from your book is that a sense of community is an important part of wellbeing. Where do you find community in your own life?
I have lived in the same small midwestern college town almost continually since 1972. I have friends who I knew in my 20s and friends from various communities—neighbors, activists, writers, therapists and musicians. Many of my friends know each other and we have watched our children grow up together. I am deeply grateful for this. My community has helped hold my family’s lives in place. However, knowing so many people for so long also means that I go to lots of funerals and make many hospital visits.

What did you learn while writing this book that surprised you, either about yourself or in research?
I realized that a great deal of my thought came from white men. I had read Rousseau, Tolstoy, Lincoln, Camus, Thoreau and Whitman. I challenged myself to find women’s quotations for this book. I was happily surprised by how many new authors I met as I researched the book. I also realized I had pretty much downloaded Eleanor Roosevelt into my head. Her quotes kept showing up in every chapter!

Where are you rowing to next?
I want to become more engaged in saving our democracy from money and greed. I want to work to stop climate change so that the grandchildren of humans and all other species have a clean, green planet to inhabit.

 

Author photo by Sarah Greder

In Mary Pipher's inspiring new book, Women Rowing North, she considers the psychological effects of aging on women. Women face many challenges as they age: misogyny, ageism, loss and physical changes. Yet Pipher shows that most older women are more content than their younger selves. Here, Pipher answers a few questions about her new book.
NonfictionMemoir

Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

Interview by Lily McLemore

Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman’s Sounds Like Titanic is so fabulously surreal, I checked twice to be certain it was indeed a memoir and not a work of fiction. In her debut, Hindman recounts the nearly four years she spent as a violinist in an ensemble led by an eccentric man whom she refers to only as the Composer. Hindman and the other musicians perform shows across America in performance halls, malls and at fairs, but they’re part of a bizarre deception: The musicians are barely making sounds with their instruments. The music the audience hears is coming from a hidden CD player hooked up to the speakers. 

“From the very beginning of working with that group, I knew that there was a story,” Hindman says in a call to her home in Kentucky, where she teaches creative writing at Northern Kentucky University.

Playing the violin professionally had been Hindman’s dream since she was a child growing up in a small West Virginia town, as her devotion to the instrument earned her peers’ awe and adults’ respect. Hindman recalls, “There was something going on in the way people would look at me when I played the violin, that I could tell even as a kid, it made them think of me as more serious.” Being a classical musician also allowed her to escape the suffocating confines of gender norms—she was a talented violinist, not a talented girl.

Determined to leave her Appalachian upbringing behind, she applied to and was accepted at Columbia. But at Columbia, she realized that while she was talented and hardworking, she was far from a spectacular violinist. Tuition was also exorbitant, and when she saw a job listing for a violinist with a famous composer and his Billboard-topping ensemble, she mustered up her last dregs of optimism and sent in an audition tape. 

She was stunned when she got the job. The Composer has sold millions of albums, and his uplifting, soaring music has scored numerous television specials. It also sounds just like the soundtrack for the 1997 film Titanic. “It’s as close as you can get to the Titanic soundtrack without being the Titanic soundtrack,” Hindman says. “Hours and hours and hours of instrumental music with a lot of penny whistle and violin and light piano playing.”

When she first began performing with the ensemble, the admiration on the faces of audience members listening to her “play” was like a drug. But during a seven-week cross-country tour with the ensemble in a decrepit RV, Hindman realized a few things about the Composer. His diet was seemingly composed entirely of apples and cereal. He was unable to remember Hindman’s name, and instead called her Melissa for the entire tour. He was unfamiliar with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and in 2004, he had no idea who John Kerry was. Before every concert, he told the ensemble that they must remember to grin throughout the entire performance because “some people out there have cancer.”

“When you look at him, he looks like a famous composer,” Hindman says. But as she stood on stage with him, faking a smile and pretending to play the violin, she began to lose touch with reality. She started having crippling panic attacks, sometimes multiple times within an hour. The violin no longer provided her with an escape. 

“I think that there was something that was just plain old stage fright about it, where you’re just up on the stage and all these people are  looking at you,” she says. “Because the music was prerecorded . . . all you’re doing is basically standing in front of people playing a role. You have a lot of time to think.” 

Working with the Composer was a grueling, difficult time for Hindman, when her understanding of who she was and what she wanted was turned on its head. But it also forced her to inspect some of her flawed beliefs about gender and femininity, the definition of success and happiness, and the debatable merits of working yourself to near-death. “I think part of it was just growing up and realizing that the pressures that I was putting on myself at that age were just completely unreasonable and dumb,” she says. “There’s all these other aspects of life that have nothing to do with winning trophies or being the best at anything but that are just as important. Certainly, writing the book itself helped me congeal all of this in my mind.”

It’s clear that Hindman feels conflicted about the Composer, although she is generously empathetic. “Probably the biggest surprise was how I started feeling a lot more like I had so much in common with the Composer. As I was reading and revising the book, I started to feel a more profound kinship with him in terms of, like, well, what do you do if you’re not born with genius? You have to work your way around that in some way.”

Surprisingly, Hindman’s bizarre, existentially traumatic stint as a pseudo-professional violinist hasn’t spoiled classical music for her. “I listen to violin music all the time. I don’t play so much anymore,” she says. Although her violin days are over, Hindman can be assured that she’s accomplished something incredible: She has written a memoir about identity and finding a sense of self that is funny, personal, empathetic and, amazingly, true.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman’s Sounds Like Titanic is so fabulously surreal, I checked twice to be certain it was indeed a memoir and not a work of fiction. In her debut, Hindman recounts the nearly four years she spent as a violinist in an ensemble led by an eccentric man whom she refers to only as […]

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