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Comfort me with Apples
by Ruth Reichl

I enjoyed the first volume of Ruth Reichl's ongoing memoir considerably. In a way she picks up where she left off with Tender at the Bone, with more recipes and more details of her odd and engaging life. She has made two very good decisions with regard to this memoir. The first decision was to write it at all, because who is to say what people will find interesting, or not? You could just as easily not write about your own life and no one would care one way or another unless you are a famous comedian or murderer, or preferably both.

It was nice to include the recipes and hard to imagine that she would not have done so, but I have to admit that in this second volume (and I understand there is to be a third -- hurrah!) I did not read any of the recipes. I am quite sure this was the wrong thing to do, but the recipes in the first volume were just so 'not me' that I didn't stop to read the recipes in this book. I think maybe the main reason was the book was too exciting. Rather than think about cooking I wanted to keep turning pages. It's odd that a life can be suspenseful as it is told, but if this book is any evidence, certainly possible.

The other good decision was not to proceed sequentially, but instead to become more intimate. Actually some people would find it surprising that anyone would write so openly about their extramarital affairs, their struggles with adoption, their romantic adventures. But the way Ruth Reichl connects it all to her family, her life, and her food, it seems quite natural for her to tell us the whole story.

One of the revealing aspects of the book, quite surprising to me, was that I knew several of the people she talked about in the Los Angeles restaurant scene during the 1970s. Not too surprisingly, these passages were quite evocative for me, but when I thought about it a little bit more I realized it was because I knew the people. I was able to fill in quite a bit that Ruth Reichl didn't even begin to supply in her writing.

Still and all, this was a real page turner, and I read on and on, into the night, until I was too sleepy to even turn another page. I'm definitely looking forward to the third book in the series. Thanks, Ruth!

Romantically dine your way over to amazon.com and Comfort yourself with Apples by Ruth Reichl.

reviewed September 5, 2001