Food Is the Hero--Not the Villain

In writing the book, I tried to make that theme the organizing principle--the factor that governed which episodes and incidents from the past, along with which friends and family members, would take center stage. One of the greatest difficulties I encountered was determining how often, and for how long, I could and should digress from the subject of eating. Eating was the big, main river. If the tributaries were many and frequent, would the larger landscape come to seem incoherent?

I fiddled as I tried to figure that out, cutting out whole periods of time and lengthy anecdotes, then adding some of them back, then taking a few away again, then just scratching my head. There was a long riff on the sad and comical fates of the various dogs in my family's life: it ended up on the cutting-room floor. There remains a long riff on a stupid email joke at Newsweek magazine that spawned the rumor that Mary Tyler Moore had died. Maybe it shouldn't be there.

Writing a memoir is strange that way: there's no right, no wrong, a dozen different opinions from a dozen different friends, and an ultimate acknowledgment by all of them that only you can decide what to lose and what to keep because it's your story--such a deeply, deeply personal thing.

A few of those friends and a few of my relatives asked me, as they read the manuscript, if I was sure I wanted the book to be quite as personal as it is. Some early reviews have said that the book includes a few revelations too many. My thinking as I laid bare my saddest and craziest moments was that I should hold myself to the same standard I've always tried, as a journalist, to hold profile subjects to. I should demand full candor, specific details--the works. I've urged that on people I've profiled, because their stories usually wind up more compelling and amusing that way. So I urged it on myself too.

I've been asked if I was and am concerned that some of these revelations--that I feared food in the past; that my binges didn't discriminate between good and bad food; that I was long fixated on quantity as much as quality--cast the reviews I wrote during five-plus years as the Times restaurant critic in a different light. I'm not sure how to respond to that, because I'm not sure what exactly the questioners mean.

Are they suggesting I was more favorably inclined toward restaurants that hurled fewer calories in my path? Reflecting on hundreds of reviews, I don't see that pattern.

Are they suggesting I approached restaurants and eating with a trepidation that somehow colored what I wrote? I don't see or sense that in the hundreds of thousands of words I filed, but readers would be better judges than I.

I like to think that my ability, after such a turbulent history with food, to do the critic's job for five years and to stay in good health, at a steady weight, meant an extra measure of joy in the job I was doing--a particular kind of celebration. I see food, in the end, as the hero of the story, not the villain. Conveying that was the trickiest aspect of this book. I remember breathing a huge sigh of relief when the writer Tom Perrotta emailed me a blurb for the back cover that said that reading the book made him hungry. I hope it makes other readers hungry too.

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