Culture

Food Critic Ruth Reichl Makes the Leap to Fiction

PBS's Ruth Reichl, former editor of the now-defunct Gourmet Magazine, is the latest beloved food writer to score a high-profile book deal. Hers is an interesting one.

By Zach Schonfeld
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PBS's Ruth Reichl, former editor of the now-defunct Gourmet Magazine, is the latest beloved food writer to score a high-profile book deal.

But Reichl won't be going the Marilyn Hagerty route, which is to say, cobbling together a 250-page anthology of poetically terse restaurant reviews that describe waiters as "friendly, but impersonal" and napkins as "natural-colored." Nor is she doing the Anthony Bourdain thing, for that matter.

Reichl is writing a novel, her first work of fiction after three best-selling memoirs. It will be published by Random House, The New York Times reports. Did we mention it's a three-book deal?

The first of the three is about a cache of secret correspondences written during World War II, with a plot involving "sisters, family ties, and a young woman who must finally let go of guilt and grief to embrace her own true gifts," Theresa Zoro, Random House's Director of Publicity told The Atlantic Wire in an email. Oh, and also the food world. And it's titled Delicious!

It'll be interesting, at the very least.

"In her bestselling memoirs Ruth Reichl has long illuminated the theme of how food defines us," Zoro wrote, "and never more so than in her dazzling fiction debut."

Reichl is not the first food writer to make the leap to novelist, though she is probably the most famous. Gael Greene, famously of New York, dabbled in fiction in the '80s, while the aptly named Aaron Hamburger more recently chronicled how food writing "fed [his] fiction." And Jonathan Safran Foer, of course, made the opposite jump, sort of.

We anxiously await Marilyn Hagerty's debut novel.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.