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Connie

With candor and humor, Connie Chung shares the highs and lows of her trailblazing career as a journalist in her invigorating memoir, Connie.
With candor and humor, Connie Chung shares the highs and lows of her trailblazing career as a journalist in her invigorating memoir, Connie.
NonfictionMemoirLGBTQ+

Frighten the Horses

Oliver Radclyffe’s Frighten the Horses is a powerful standout among the burgeoning subgenre of gender transition memoirs.
Oliver Radclyffe’s Frighten the Horses is a powerful standout among the burgeoning subgenre of gender transition memoirs.
NonfictionMemoir

Health and Safety

Emily Witt’s sharp, deeply personal memoir, Health and Safety, invites us to relive a tumultuous era in American history through the eyes of a keen observer.
Emily Witt’s sharp, deeply personal memoir, Health and Safety, invites us to relive a tumultuous era in American history through the eyes of a keen observer.
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Memoir

Jacques Pepin

Interview by Eve Zibart

Jacques Pepin walks very softly in an era of the big schtick. He does not wham, or "Bam!" (although he is generous to his more flamboyant colleagues: "After all, Emeril Lagasse has done a lot to introduce people to food and to the fun of cooking"). He prefers to inspire rather than to dazzle and has been teaching at the French Culinary Institute in New York and Boston University for more than 30 years.

Pepin still loves to cook and says that "if I don't cook for two or three days, I get edgy." Despite his classical training in the kitchens of France, he maintains that he found his own style in the anti-artifice revolution of nouvelle cuisine. "My tastes have remained simple," he writes.

And finally, there is the sense of spiritual as well as physical nourishment that pervades his cooking shows. Here's a guy in touch with his feminine side. "I realized," he writes, "although I had worked mostly with men in the great restaurants of Paris and New York, the sort of cooking I was now turning to had been shown to me by women. It was the type of cooking I most loved." So naturally, the man Julia Child calls "the best chef in America" has modestly titled his memoir The Apprentice.

After 21 cookbooks, including the landmark La Technique and The Art of Cooking, Pepin has produced a characteristically gentle reminiscence of his "Life in the Kitchen," as the subtitle has it. It ranges back to his boyhood in his mother's various restaurants (and his escapades of stealing fruit with his brother), through his years learning sauces, grill techniques and stocks in some of the most famous restaurants of two countries: Le Meurice and the Plaza Athenee, Le Pavillon and his own Midtown Manhattan "soup kitchen," La Potagerie.

Public TV viewers who remember the video of Pepin bicycling to the market to fill his handlebar basket will be charmed to know that it's a sort of quiet tribute to his mother, who worked as a waitress supporting three small sons while her husband was off in the army during World War II: "[Riding] an old bicycle with solid rubber tires (no inner tubes) . . . she pedaled thirty-five or forty miles, going from farm to farm, filling the wicker basket strapped on the back of her bicycle with bread, eggs, meat, chicken, honey anything that she could find that would help feed us." With this background, it is not surprising that Pepin is a champion of food that is good from the bottom up, so to speak: fresh, healthful and prepared with an appreciation of its true nature rather than its "star quality."

"You know, a lot is said these days about great chefs, but not enough is said about the farmers," he said recently from his office in the French Culinary Institute. "Food should taste of what it is, as well as of how it has been transformed. Both things are worthwhile. If you have a nice piece of pork, and you roast it and maybe serve it with a little sauce, it has its own character. And if you add some shallots and some mushrooms and cognac and make a pate, that is also delicious. But it must have quality, and the cook must respect that."

On the other hand, Pepin is astonished at the wastefulness of modern-day chefs, and says that he was recently at one of those celebrity chef extravaganzas in California. "There were like 20 chefs, and when I went into the kitchen, I went crazy. A slightly wilted piece of broccoli or a bruised piece of basil and they threw it away. Frankly, I'd like to do a series on 'garbage food,' just using what most people waste."

His own cooking "was always pretty straightforward, but you have to remember that I started my apprenticeship in 1949, and we still had [ration] tickets for sugar and meat and eggs. A chicken was a big deal." The recipes that are scattered through the memoir, from a Reuben sandwich and New England clam chowder to braised rabbit, are examples of what he calls his "modern American cuisine with strong French influences." And yet none will frighten the amateur chef.

Apprenticed at 13, Pepin has cooked high and low. Having survived naval KP to become personal chef to de Gaulle before emigrating to New York, he turned down the position of chef to the Kennedy White House to take a job re-inventing the corporate kitchen for (the real) Howard Johnson. And he very nearly gave it all up for the life of an academic, lacking only the thesis for his doctorate in French literature from Columbia, even though he'd had to begin by taking English classes. He became a close friend of Craig Claiborne, James Beard, Alice Waters and of course the ebullient Child. He consulted on the creation of the Windows on the World.

Then in 1974, a car crash left him with multiple fractures. It was during his slow convalescence that he stumbled onto consulting, teaching, writing and doing television.

In fact, Pepin is about to tape a new series. "I wanted to call it, 'My Fast Food,' to show how to make simple, good but quick family food, but the producers didn't like it; so I don't know what to call it." It will be his 14th series, but the phenomenon of the celebrity chef is still a marvel to Pepin. "When I was coming up, you know, 50 years ago, being a chef was pretty low on the social scale. A good mother would have wanted her son to be a doctor or a lawyer."

Eve Zibart is a writer for The Washington Post.

 

Jacques Pepin walks very softly in an era of the big schtick. He does not wham, or "Bam!" (although he is generous to his more flamboyant colleagues: "After all, Emeril Lagasse has done a lot to introduce people to food and to the fun of cooking"). He prefers to inspire rather than to dazzle and […]
Memoir

Final words from a beloved historian

Review by bookpagedev

College professors sometimes wish for the impossible: an opportunity to re-convene class to correct or amend lectures they delivered years ago. A full-time university teacher for 35 years before retiring from academia seven years ago, top-selling historian Stephen Ambrose came as close as one can to achieving that feat before his death in October. “I want to correct all the mistakes I made” in the classroom, he said, in explaining his decision to write To America: Personal Reflections of a Historian.

For instance, acknowledging “I did not know then what I do now,” Ambrose says in his final work that, contrary to what generations of students have been taught, it was disease not a deliberate policy of genocide that wiped out many Indian tribes as the government pushed the frontier westward. At first, he denounced the bombing of Hiroshima but, upon learning more, began telling his students: “Thank God for Harry Truman for his courage and decisiveness.” He details why he came to praise rather than condemn the “robber barons” who mined millions of dollars in financing the first transcontinental railroad. And he explains how he evolved from an admitted Nixon hater to someone with a genuine appreciation of the disgraced president.

To America is a mixture of interpretive history, personal recollection and parental musings from one of our country’s most popular historians with subjects ranging from Thomas Jefferson (“an intellectual coward” for doing nothing about slavery) to Lyndon Johnson, from racialism to women’s rights, from war heroes to explorers. Ambrose also shares the work habit that resulted in his writing or editing some 30 books, a number of which sped from the bindery to best-seller lists: “You do it by working hard, six to 10 hours per day, six or seven days a week.” He was also helped by the services of an “in-house” editor; his wife Moira listened to his readings of whatever he wrote each day and offered her suggestions. Thus, his advice to aspiring authors: “Marry an English major.” Ambrose wrote To America after learning in April that he had lung cancer. Unsure how long he would live, he set aside other work to write this final book, which he described as his “best” which means better than such blockbusters as Undaunted Courage, Citizen Soldiers and D-Day June 6, 1944. Whether or not To America is his best work, its pages certainly pulsate with the spirit and optimism of an author who was deeply in love with America.

College professors sometimes wish for the impossible: an opportunity to re-convene class to correct or amend lectures they delivered years ago. A full-time university teacher for 35 years before retiring from academia seven years ago, top-selling historian Stephen Ambrose came as close as one can to achieving that feat before his death in October. “I […]
Memoir

Revealing glimpses of popular icons

Review by bookpagedev

Chicago-based entertainment writer Bill Zehme (pronounced ZAY-mee) has been cranking out interesting and colorful celebrity profiles for 20 years, mostly for such magazines as Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. Few journalists have managed to produce such a steady body of quality work interviews at once entertaining and informative, focusing on media icons and written in an incisive, yet edgy, style.

Intimate Strangers, an engrossing collection of Zehme’s notable stories from the past two decades, showcases the author’s sometimes quirky but always fascinating approaches to the minds of such legendary figures as Hugh Hefner, Tom Hanks, Cameron Diaz, the Seinfeld gang, Johnny Depp and Eddie Murphy.

Zehme doesn’t merely ask a series of prepared questions; he’ll often spend days with his interviewees, keeping his tape recorder on, sharing their lives and gaining the necessary trust to elicit offbeat, ultimately revealing responses. The fact that these pieces date back to the early 80s ensures a curiously welcome historical perspective on popular culture. We hear Woody Allen’s pained remarks during the aftermath of the still-simmering Soon-Yi scandal; glimpse notorious ladies’ man Warren Beatty in the days before he settles down into wedded bliss; and listen to Madonna during her peak as a pop tart talking about Catholicism and the importance of her father in her life.

The book concludes with an insightful series of alternating, point-counterpoint interviews that Zehme published through the 90s with David Letterman and Jay Leno, during the era of Johnny Carson’s impending retirement. With Zehme just recently launching a new cable interview show on the Bravo channel, the timing is perfect for the release of this hip collection, which exhibits his skills as pop journalist to maximum effect. Filmmaker Cameron Crowe provides the introduction.

Chicago-based entertainment writer Bill Zehme (pronounced ZAY-mee) has been cranking out interesting and colorful celebrity profiles for 20 years, mostly for such magazines as Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. Few journalists have managed to produce such a steady body of quality work interviews at once entertaining and informative, focusing on media icons and […]
History

Winning the peace after WWII

Review by bookpagedev

In The Conquerors, presidential historian Michael Beschloss delivers a fascinating exploration of how the Allies decided to deal with the threat posed by Germany after World War II. As he shows in the book, Franklin Delano Roosevelt fervently believed that it would not be enough to defeat the Nazis militarily. It was also imperative that the Allies lay the foundation for democracy in postwar Germany. Without that, history indicated it was likely that Germany would initiate another war in the decades ahead. Despite sharp policy difference with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, not to mention division within his own cabinet, FDR’s broad vision prevailed. This piece of wartime statecraft, says Beschloss, was “one of America’s great 20th century international achievements.” In exploring the complexity of FDR’s leadership and demonstrating that the politician who wanted to keep his options open, who was flexible and duplicitous, was also able to win the acceptance of such positions as Germany’s unconditional surrender, Beschloss drawing on previously unseen documents from the FBI, Russia and private archives tells an absorbing story, one that’s carefully researched and compellingly written. Among FDR’s major flaws was his refusal to publicly condemn what we know as the Holocaust until 1944, although he had learned of it much earlier. Also, in what Beschloss describes as “one of the great mistakes of modern diplomacy,” neither FDR nor his negotiators raised the issue of U.S. or British access to Berlin because it might make the Russians “suspicious.” In 1945, General Dwight Eisenhower said the success of the Allied occupation of Germany could only be judged in 50 years. “If the Germans at that time have a stable, prosperous democracy, then we shall have succeeded.” This important book is a cogent reminder from the relatively recent past that it is often not enough to achieve military victory. Winning the peace is also crucially important. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and regular contributor to BookPage.

In The Conquerors, presidential historian Michael Beschloss delivers a fascinating exploration of how the Allies decided to deal with the threat posed by Germany after World War II. As he shows in the book, Franklin Delano Roosevelt fervently believed that it would not be enough to defeat the Nazis militarily. It was also imperative that […]
Travel

Isabel Allende

Interview by Alden Mudge

Like many writers, novelist Isabel Allende thinks of herself as an outsider. "I have always been by temperament a dissident and a rebel," she says during a call to her home in Marin County, California. "This has been my struggle all my life."

But it’s one thing to be somewhat alienated from family and social class, as Allende was in her youth, and quite another to be sent into exile from your homeland. Allende fled her native Chile shortly after a CIA-assisted coup on Tuesday, September 11, 1973, led to the overthrow and death of her uncle Salvador Allende Gossens, the democratically elected president of Chile. The coup resulted in a brutal military dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet. From exile in Venezuela, on January 8, 1981, Allende began writing a letter to her grandfather, an old-school Chilean who was nearing his 100th birthday and in failing health. The letter soon developed into Allende’s mesmerizing first novel, The House of the Spirits, which marked the beginning of her extraordinary literary career.

Outsiders almost always have an intense and ambivalent longing for the inside. This is certainly true of Allende. While her marvelous new memoir, My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile, offers stinging criticism of her native land – its machismo, its religious and political oppression, its shameful treatment of native populations – Allende’s love for Chile is so evident and eloquent that many readers will consider packing their bags and booking the next flight to Santiago.

"When you are born in a place, especially a small place that feels like a village, you put up with the bad things and love the good things," Allende says. "There is a strong sense of community, of family, or extended family that still exists there. People in Chile will tell you, No, that’s over, it’s gone, it’s not like it was before.’ But coming from the United States, it’s the first thing that you see."

Allende has lived in the San Francisco Bay area since she met and married an American attorney, whose life and adventures were the basis for her novel The Infinite Plan. "California resembles Chile more than any other place in the United States," she says. "Not only the landscape and the vegetation and the weather, but the fact that some sense of Hispanic culture is very present here. My husband says that Chile looks like California looked 40 years ago."

Since Pinochet stepped down in 1994 and democratic institutions have slowly returned to Chile, Allende has been making annual visits home to see her mother, stepfather and members of her large extended family. Some of her family members read the manuscript for My Invented Country and, she says, "everyone had a different opinion." "I thought the book was going to be terribly criticized in Chile. But, actually, it was pirated immediately, it was sold in the streets, it became number one on the bestseller list, and the reviews have been great."

This is a surprise, and Allende explains it this way: "Many years ago when I was young, I used to write feminist articles, humorous articles, making fun of men and the things that men do because they are so macho. I would get loads of fan letters from men who enjoyed the articles and said they had a friend just like the man I described. It was always a friend. It was never them. I think that is what happened with this book. Readers think this is how the other Chileans are."

Allende’s sense of humor in conversation and on the page is enthralling. And as readers of her novels and previous memoir, Paula, know, she is a gifted storyteller who forges an enchanting amalgam of memory and imagination. "Memory and imagination are so closely intertwined that I can hardly separate them," Allende says. "If you and I see the same event, we will perceive it differently and we will remember it differently. When I wrote my very first memoir, which was Paula, I was in an altered state. My daughter Paula was dying. But even so, in the process of writing the book, I was perfectly conscious of the fact that I would choose what I was going to write and what I was going to omit, what adjectives I was selecting to describe a situation. That is an exercise in imagination; that’s a choice. Because if we were to remember without imagination, we would use no adjectives. It would be just nouns. But in life we remember the color, the flavor, the emotion. Not the facts."

According to Allende, the facts of life are mixed. "The world is a horrible place but also a wonderful place. For every horrible person out there doing evil, a thousand people are doing good. But good is silent, discrete, unassuming, whereas evil is so noisy. We only hear about the evil in the world."

In the Chile of Allende’s youth and, in a more menacing way under the dictatorship, "life was supposed to be uncomfortable and unsafe. . . . Even if you broke your neck tripping on the sidewalk there was no one to blame. It was your own fate."

This perspective made it very difficult for Allende to feel at home in the United States. "When I came here I had the feeling that this country was invulnerable, invincible, that the people had the arrogance of the winners, and that I could never belong here. The idea that you could go through life without fear, that you could go through life always feeling safe, that you are insured against every hazard of life, was just so foreign to me."

Exactly 28 years after her uncle’s violent demise led to her exile from Chile, on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Allende discovered a suddenly vulnerable America and felt she "had gained a country." In conversation, Allende says My Invented Country "was born out of a crazy idea when my grandson Alejandro said ‘I think you are going to live at least three more years,’ and I wondered, well, where do I want to live them." That is no doubt true. But it is also true that the two September 11s mark the metaphorical beginning and end of Allende’s nostalgic journey. The path she follows between these two points vividly illustrates the good humor, humane spirit, tough mind and open heart we will all require to create a viable home in our new world.

 

Like many writers, novelist Isabel Allende thinks of herself as an outsider. "I have always been by temperament a dissident and a rebel," she says during a call to her home in Marin County, California. "This has been my struggle all my life." But it’s one thing to be somewhat alienated from family and social […]
Memoir

E. Lynn Harris

Interview by Jay MacDonald

As preface to his remarkably honest memoir, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, best-selling novelist E. Lynn Harris offers this epigram: "Work like you don’t need the money, dance like nobody is watching and love like you’ve never been hurt."

Similar grand passions sweep across the pages and back through the years as the ebullient Harris recounts his former double life: by day, the quintessential "buppie," pulling down big bucks as an IBM computer salesman; by night, a closeted gay man searching for storybook love in the callous shadows of the urban club scene.

Hard work, a passion for soul music and the staunch resolve to remain a hopeless romantic enabled him to overcome depression, a suicide attempt and the loss of numerous friends to AIDS. His is a cautionary tale about a cautionless time, an era that fortunately allowed gentle souls such as Harris a few bad choices. What Becomes of the Brokenhearted is not a question here, but an affirmation, perhaps even a prayer.

 

Not many new writers would have the audacity to offer up their memoirs at the tender age of 48. Then again, Harris’ life has been far from ordinary and closer in truth to his eight larger-than-life multiracial, multi-sexual romances, including Invisible Life (1991), Abide with Me (1999) and Any Way the Wind Blows (2001). Harris actually embarked upon his memoirs seven years earlier, both to exorcise his demons and to satisfy fans curious to know where his real life ends and his fiction begins.

"Even as I was spending the last seven years going through my past, people kept saying, why now?" he says by phone from his Atlanta home. "It was very difficult because every time I would go back and write it and read what I had written, I had to relive that part of my life, where now life is so good. I guess that makes you stronger in a lot of ways."

Growing up poor in the shadow of his abusive stepfather Ben in Little Rock, Arkansas, Harris developed an early ability to turn adversity into advantage, lemons into lemonade. The temperamental Ben always called him Mike, after a neighborhood tough, preferring it to his "sissy" given name, Everette Lynn. Harris recounts one Easter when Ben went into a rage and ripped the boy’s brand new Sunday suit because he had buttoned the jacket "like a little girl." His mother and three sisters, dressed in their Easter finery, could only look on in horror.

"At some point in each of our lives we realize that life is not necessarily going to be fair," the author says. "That was the day for me that I knew I was going to have to pick up some skills to survive." When life got messy, he would retreat into the refuge of his imagination, a lush, passionate world far removed from Little Rock. One of the first black students to attend the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, the gregarious Harris excelled, becoming the first black cheerleader and yearbook editor. After graduation, IBM recruited him for a sales position in Dallas, where he was once again the oddity, a young black liberal arts grad in an office of older white engineers. It was another world, a white heterosexual world, but one he would conquer with his natural salesmanship. He set his sights on a six-figure salary by age 29; he achieved it at 26.

Harris recalls being suddenly assigned to host two corporate CEOs on a high-stakes junket to San Francisco, a mission for which he was woefully unprepared at 23. Halfway through the first-class flight west, he turned to the two industry titans and admitted that he didn’t have a clue about what he was doing.

"It really helped me a lot because they taught me and they had a great time," he says.

By day, Harris was a straight arrow; by night, he was carefully exploring the gay bars wherever he found himself: Dallas, New York, Washington, D.C. It was the height of the disco era. Although Harris loved the nightlife, it didn’t love him back.

"One of the group used to jokingly refer to me as such a Mary Tyler Moore-type of person, and that was from my Southern upbringing," he says. "Everybody wanted me to be their little brother; they wanted me as a friend. I don’t know if it was the angels protecting me but a lot of these men that I would have jumped at the chance to be intimate with later died [of AIDS]."

"I was basically still trying to be Mr. All-American who just happened to be gay; I mean, the things that I was interested in sports, the theater and dating I wanted it to be romantic. And I kept getting messages like, hey, you don’t get to be romantic in this life. I just could not believe it was all about sex."

The high life did offer temporary relief from chronic depression, but at a heavy cost. Shortly after his 1990 suicide attempt, Harris sobered up, moved to Atlanta and began writing a fictionalized account of his life as a gay black man. When his manuscript for Invisible Life elicited no response from New York publishers, he published it himself and shrewdly placed it in beauty parlors and bookstores where he knew he would find an audience for his thoroughly modern romances.

"Some people can’t understand women going crazy over me at my signings, almost like a rock star, knowing my sexuality. I think it’s because they know my heart and we’ve been through a lot of the same things together."

Harris applauds the recent Supreme Court ruling on gay rights and the growing acceptance of gay marriage.

"I think that the move by the Supreme Court is a real relief. I just hope that people will take it slow. Sometimes so much injury can be done when people feel they are being forced to do something or accept something. I think it’s hard for straight people to understand what it’s like to be gay, but I think more of them are willing to open their minds about the individuals."

If he could, would he change his sexual preference? "No. Ask me that three or four years ago, it might have been different. If a genie came and granted me a wish of not being gay, would I take it? Yes, if it was a genie, because that would be fantasy. If God came, I would say no because that is obviously the way he wanted me."

Jay MacDonald is a professional writer based in Mississippi.

 

As preface to his remarkably honest memoir, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, best-selling novelist E. Lynn Harris offers this epigram: "Work like you don’t need the money, dance like nobody is watching and love like you’ve never been hurt." Similar grand passions sweep across the pages and back through the years as the ebullient Harris […]

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