hunger was a discipline

This essay contains mild spoilers for A Moveable Feast, Julie and Julia, Another Marvellous Thing, Shine On, You Bright and Dangerous Object. I would genuinely recommend reading all these books so if you’d rather read them with fresh eyes, maybe hold out to read this essay until afterwards.

What connects Ernest Hemingway, a writer famous for his stoic male characters and minimal style of prose, and Jessie Ware, a pop star famous for her horny disco bangers? You may or may not be surprised when I say, food writing.

Hemingway probably didn’t think of himself as a food writer. Even his posthumous memoir, A Moveable Feast, despite the title, wouldn’t be classed technically as a '“food-oir”. Instead, it is a set of recollections of when he first lived in Paris with his wife Hadley, when he wasn’t earning much money but hobnobbing with all the literary and art elite of the time, like Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford and more. It was Jessie Ware who introduced me to the term “food-oir”, which is what she calls the genre of her own autobiography, Omelette, where each chapter of her life is meant to be centred around some item of food or drink (although I will say some are certainly more food themed than others).

Both of these books are at their best when they are at the most entertaining when doing what celebrity memoirs do best: telling anecdotes about other famous people. Hemingway talks about F Scott Fitzgerald’s worries about his penis size and sexual prowess. Ware talks about being one of the first to read Fifty Shades of Grey, when E.L James was just ‘Erika’. Both books are short and fun and make you want to hang out with both authors. But what they both share is like any food-oir, they try to use food to speak to something else within ourselves.

The ‘food-oir’ industry itself has been booming in the last decade or so. There are big success stories like Stanley Tucci’s Taste, where Tucci tals about how growing up in an italian family and with italian food has informed his work and worldview. There are critical darlings like Crying in H-Mart by Michelle Zauner, which use food as an entry point to talk about grieving her mother’s loss from cancer (yes, it has been on my TBR for a while but also I have to psyche myself up for it). And, while food based memoirs have existed in the zeitgeist since writers like MFK Fisher and Elizabeth David first popularised the form in the 1940s and 1950s, perhaps one of the greatest influences in the last twenty years on the domain of food writing and food-oirs is Julie and Julia, the book based off a food blog and then launched a food film, which in turn must have launched so many other food blogs, and therefore food books (and occasional food films). It documents Julie Powell, who while working as a administrator dealing with the aftermath of 9/11, takes on cooking the entirety of Julia Child’s Mastering The Art of French Cooking.

The first thing that surprised me is that when I was reading A Moveable Feast, I couldn’t help but think Hemingway would have liked Julie Powell (although unsure how he may have approved of her actions as a woman). Both of whom are self-deprecating and appreciated a good drink, for one. But also there is something surprisingly thorny about both Powell and Hemingway as narrators. Hemingway slags off most of the people who appear in his book, basically calling Ford Madox Ford stinky and Scott Fitzgerald a whole litany of things. In the movie version of J&J, made by another famous foodie Nora Ephron, Powell is played by doe-eyed Amy Adams, but Powell said that Adams played her ‘too nice’. Only once reading the book did I understand what she meant.

Powell is a fun narrator to hang out with. But she’s far more prickly and interesting then the Hollywood version would connote. Some of her humour has aged incredibly badly, often punching down rather than up. And while Film Julie weeps with sympathy for the people who ring her at her job, book Julie actually specifies she is not a crier, in this passage which felt incredibly true to anyone who has had to work a customer service job over the phone.

“I am not a crier - well, not at work anyway. I maintain more of a Weimar-era tough cookie image, all paper cuts and ironic hysteria and dark circles under the eyes, So instead of crying, I sigh when asked to get a box of Kleenex for a grieving window, or bang my head wearily on my desk in the middle of phones calls from some woman who can’t walk anymore and hasn’t been out of her apartment for a week and used to be a great hoofer and was un pictures but now can’t pay her medical bills and thinks the only appropriate thing to build would be a reproduction of the ‘39 World’s Fair. Instead of crying, I make withering comments about little old men who send us poems with titles like “The Angels of 911”. It passes the time. But hard-bitten cynicism leaves one feeling peevish, and too much of it can lasting damage to the heart.”

Despite the potentially contentious material, Julie and Julia was a massive hit. But Powell’s follow up Cleaving was not received well by the press. Written in the immediate aftermath, it followed a similiar format, where Julie dedicates herself to another long-term food project, this time learning butchery, but with one major difference: the book details her cheating on her husband Eric, who had been the beloved and beleaguered second string in J&J. I have yet to read Cleaving, although reading J&J, I actually think that narratively, it kind of makes sense. Not that she should have cheated on her husband, but the primary narrative of J&J, alongside her obsession with cooking, is of thwarted desire. This is not just because she is trying to figure out what she actually wanted to do with her life after an acting career that never took off, but how often the circumstances of her crappy flat, the cooking and various mishaps interfere with what she calls “connubial bliss” with her husband. Powell also describes how being with the same man since she was 18 means she has minimal experience outside of her husband, and has two separate plot lines where she advises one friend who is the other woman in an affair, and another where she wonders whether to advise friend on whether to leave her husband and have an affair. She decides in the end not to judge her friend for it, giving more neutral advice.

One of the criticisms of Cleaving seems to be how Powell talking about meat seems to be used a clumsy metaphor for what was happening in her personal life. But for one, you can hardly blame her when she did it to such great success the first time. Also, it’s literally what every food writer does. In fact, it’s what every celebrated non-fiction writer does. You think you’re reading a book about someone making a difficult trek over a geographical space? You’re obviously reading the writer’s emotional journey over some internal conflict through their life. You’re reading about a woman adopting a goshawk? It’s about the writer coping with grief. Through the specific, we can say something universal. Sorry, that’s most writing!

But the thing with food writing, is that there is often the predominant theme of desire, and our fight against it.

“Hunger was a discipline” is a chapter in which Hemingway describes how “you got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people are outside at tables on the sidewalk that you saw and smelled the food.” He then goes on for at least a page and a half about the route he would take simply so he didn’t have to walk past any cafes, bakeries or restaurants to avoid being hungry. This sense of trying to restrain himself perhaps the most common theme underlying A Moveable Feast. Firstly, there are also a couple of chapters where he refers to about having to restrain himself from betting on horses. and then secondly, “There is Never Any End to Paris”.

The final chapter of A Moveable Feast, “There is Never Any End to Paris”, is Hemingway lamenting how terrible the rich are, and who he becomes when he is endorsed by them, calling himself a “a trained pig in the circus who has finally found someone who loves and appreciates him for himself alone”. He laments how he would even read his work aloud to please the rich people, something he never wanted to do. Then, this rant against the corruption of the rich’s influence culminates in perhaps in the most interesting revelation of the book.

“….we had already been infiltrated by another rich using the oldest trick there is. It is that an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband. When the husband is a writer and doing difficult work so that he is occupied so that he is occupied much of the time and is not a good companion or partner to his wife for a big part of the day, the arrangement has advantages until you know how it works out. The husband has two attractive girls around when he has finished work. One is new and strange and if he has bad luck he gets to love them both.”

That’s right, if you befriend rich people, one rich woman will supposedly insert herself into your life and you’ll end up having an affair with her, which will ruin everything. It’s interesting how this structure and the phrase “bad luck” makes him the passive victim of both fate and the rich woman’s actions, which suggests a universality and inevitability that he couldn’t resist if he tried. The writerly and more optimistic part of me wonders if Hemingway writes this chapter this way, not to give himself the pass of somehow being the victim in a scenario, but as a narrative structure to set the readers expectations and then pull the rug from under them. The knowledge of the affair is certainly surprising after he’s spent a whole book lovingly describing his relationship with his understanding first wife. At the point of writing this book, he was onto his fourth marriage, and about a year prior before he ended his own life. A Moveable Feast, which for the most part, has felt like a cheerful and amusing reminiscence, then becomes heavily tinged at the end with a strong taste of regret. He even says “I wish I died before I loved anyone else but her.”

When I went on holiday, I had actually tried to move away from food books for a bit. But I couldn’t escape the similarities. After all, I read Laurie Colwin’s Every Marvellous Thing. Laurie Colwin wrote one of my favourite books of all time, Happy All The Time and was also a celebrated food writer; I was first introduced to her via Home Cooking. Every Marvellous Thing is not a food book, but like every food writer writing prose, she can’t not use food as a metaphor. The book is also about an affair, and food contrasts between the wife and lover of Francis. Francis’s wife Vera is an excellent cook while Billy, Francis’s lover, never has much food in despite Francis’s post coital appetite. It is a sore point for Billie.

“Maybe you wanted to go out for dinner,” she said. “You like a proper dinner.” And then she burst into tears. “I’m sorry,” she said.

The food metaphor can be used time and time again when it comes to love because at the heart of it is the only other thing we truly hunger for is each other. While we often want things in our life, there isn’t really much else that not just our mind but our bodies desire, and then our body can actively revolt against us for if we don’t satisfy our cravings than food and physical intimacy. Clearly not trusting the reader enough with the metaphor, Colwin even lays it out plainly.

“He reflected he never got enough to eat at Billy’s and that no matter how much he got of her, his hunger for her never abated.”

The interesting thing is this is the second of Colwin’s novels I’d read which involved an affair, and the other book I have yet to read, Family Happiness, is also about an affair. In her first novel Shine On, You Bright and Dangerous Object, otherwise a tender and excellent portrayal of a grieving widow learning to love again, ends with the final third being a trip where the protagonist has an affair with a married man at music camp, while it is implied she is still presumably dating the main romantic hero, and once the camp ends it is implied she will simply return to her boyfriend in the city. Colwin’s treatment of affairs is interesting in the way that unlike most dramatized versions, the partners are never villains to do something wrong to cause the affair, there is no big blow up, and often the characters return to their previous relationships with no grand reveal. These books are published in the Eighties, and it makes you wonder whether this casual attitudes are a hangover from some cultural affects of the post sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s, or whether Colwin herself had been informed by some particular type of thinking. Of course cheating as literary scandal has existed at least since Madame Bovary if not before, and shortly after Colwin, it’s just about the same time that Jilly Cooper and her ensemble of cheating Rutshire aristocrats are about to burst onto the literary scene and leave fictional devastation in their wake.

Reading about how Frank and Billy and Ernest cheat on their supposedly lovely competent partners and knowing how Julie inevitably will, was certainly…interesting. The writer is always the one with the appetite and an appetite that needs to be satiated drives the protagonist to action. But in all these narratives, I couldn’t help but think about the other yet equally important characters in this story. That of course, being the partners.

Firstly, the thing about being in a relationship with a writer or artist means that if they ever create anything vaguely non-fiction or autofictional, you very much risk becoming a side character in Their Story, flattened to a 2D rendering no matter how sympathetic the portrait. Ever since I used to do stand up, I have felt very uncomfortable using my loved ones who are still alive as material, and I quickly figured that I am unwilling to undress them psychologically in public for the means of public spectacle and my own ego’s gratification.

When I was reading Every Marvellous Thing, I was surprised to feel such a personal reaction. In fact, I felt a novel kind of despair. The idea that you can be the perfect loving partner, contribute to someone’s life so meaningfully, and it still not be enough to satisfy some sense of self is devastating. Then, especially for the nonfiction cases, where your real life issues are being fully displayed for the public to witness and judge is extra appalling. In fact, reading all these examples has made me realise two things.

Firstly it confirmed my current long-standing practice; bar mentioning friend’s as brief cameos that say little to their character (which they have repeatedly encouraged at this point), I will try to maintain the privacy of my friends, family and loved ones where possible and I believe this is the duty of nonfiction writers everywhere. The people in your life aren’t your characters. But of course, there has to be some grace. When you write nonfiction it’s impossible to completely remove the implication that other people were involved or even nearby, but when you write, you just have to do it with care, which is something I am always learning and will never be perfect at. But I will only more determined to try. After all, it’s not just your story to tell.

The second thing I realised was after the despair, came a strange sort of comfort. The fact is that long term relationships can feel very comfortable, but that comfort sometimes lulls us into a false sense of security. So sometimes, something shocks you in a way to realise just how fragile loving someone makes you. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t trust people however. After all, it may be terrifying but also wonderful. The fact it can destroy you means you have the capacity to love someone so truly and deeply. This is a capacity that, in all the mundanities of day-to-day life, is easy to forget. But realising this suddenly makes even minute gestures seem thrilling. When your lover reaches for your hand, it is for the simple reason that in that moment they hunger for you, above all else. And if someone ended up hurting me because I deigned to trust them, I hope I won’t be embarrassed. It’s just a reminder that you were willing to offer them a great feast, and the time will come again when someone will come along and appreciate it.

So food writing may be about desire, but desire is not just about what we take, but what we can give too. And I think this is where a lot of more genteel food writing and food-oirs succeed. It’s about feeding loved ones, and loved ones feeding us, creating a universal language which brings people together in all sorts of circumstances.

So, to end and maybe cheer you guys up, here is a video of Jessie Ware’s real-life husband, who features a lot in Omelette rather unproblematically, reviewing her latest album while a few negronis in, which I personally found quite endearing. If he ever cheats on her though, I will be publicly mad about it.

The other food book I read during this period was Ed Gamble’s Glutton, and it was one I was very reluctant to read for a long time because it was announced and published within the timeframe that my own food memoir, Fussy, was meant to come out (RIP). So of course, I was bitter. (see what I did there.)

So I wanted to hate this book. I really did. The man has had possibly the greatest ride of a straight white male comedian. But you know what? I really enjoyed Glutton. Because I quickly realised there is never any pretence of this being a serious memoir or food book. He (so far) hasn’t cheated on his wife (and he’d better not) and it’s just straight up funny. I actually laughed out loud multiple times. It’s just collating all his funniest thoughts and anecdotes about food into a book, because presumably it would be too long as a stand up show. It’s a book about just being insatiably hungry for food a lot of the time, and while it could broach into deeper topics, it shies away with a self-effacement and self-awareness that worse writers would not have.

I really enjoyed American Fiction which is based on Everett’s novel The Trees and this is the first novel of his I read and wow! This book is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, and it was so smart and funny and compelling and heartbreaking in equal measure, I raced through it in one day. I haven’t read Huckleberry Finn and still loved it, and I would recommend it to everybody. I’m very excited to get into more of his books from here.

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That’s all for this edition, and I’m not sure what the next batch of books will be (I have a bunch of food grief books but that will depend on my mental health lol), but stay tuned as I’m enjoying engaging big brain thoughts on books again. I also will hopefully have something very cool to announce very soon, so keep an eye on your inbox!

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Otherwise I’ll see you next time my little cafe cremes xoxo