'Blood, Bones & Butter' Book Club Discussion 2 of 2

Welcome to the second half of our discussions about the first half of "Blood, Bones and Butter." You can find the first half here, and you can click here to learn more about our choice.

Here's a little about who you'll be hearing from...

Andrew Losowsky, Books Editor
I'm British, so anything you think I've spelled wrong, is actually just spelled older. I look for stories to take my brain into new spaces, and I'll be particularly discussing the facts as we think we know them, and the clues I think we're being given by the story. Let me know if you think I'm wrong! I'll also be choosing a few facts to use as jumping-off points for tangential discussions.

Zoë Triska, Associate Books Editor
I was a Literature major so I can't help analyzing every single thing (from the syntax and language to metaphors, similes, you name it). I (reluctantly) admit that I'm one of those people who Googles phrases, places, names every couple of pages when I'm reading. There are constantly things that stump me, though so I'd love to hear your thoughts on the significance of words, places, phrases, events that take place in the book.

Madeleine Crum, Assistant Books Editor
I like looking at language particularities, but in case you think that's a snooze (you wouldn't be alone), I'm also interested in reading what critics say about books and whether their reviews are spot on or way off. Let's talk about it.

Annemarie Dooling, Community Editor
Quotes, locations and descriptions speak to me the same way characters do. I love dissecting the same details that tell us more about the story than the actual prose. If you read the same books over and over and over again the same way you visit an out-of-town friend, we're going to get along just fine.

live blog

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@ HuffPostBooks : DON'T FORGET! Tomorrow is our #HPBookClub event at Word in Brooklyn. Come: http://t.co/6hrmzn0F #freewine #freeauthor

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We'll be announcing the new book exclusively at Word this weekend during our HuffPost Book Club live event and following that, in an email to all Book Club members on Tuesday! Can't wait to tell you what it will be!

@ spnadler : @HuffPostBooks what is the next #hpbookclub book of the month? Dying of anticipation here!

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Is It Time To Stop Asking, 'Where Are The Women?'

Margaret Wheeler Johnson pens a great criticism of the notions of female chefs as described in the later chapters of "Blood, Bones and Butter."

Do you agree with her thoughts? Are you ready to end the search for women in these fields?

If we're just talking numbers, it's not: a survey conducted by the American Culinary Foundation found that female executive chefs make $18,000 less annually than their male counterparts, and Maclean's reported in late 2011 that women hold only 10 percent of executive chef positions in the U.S.

Across professions, the numbers aren't much better. A study by Catalyst, a nonprofit that works to increase employment opportunities for women, found that in 2011 women held 16.1 percent of corporate board seats (women of color held only 3 percent), 14.1 percent of executive officer positions, and 7.5 percent of executive top-earner positions.

And yet these "Where are the women?" conversations often do seem tired, probably because we know where the women are, in almost any field. Lots of them choose to take time off to have kids and so lag behind men in terms of earnings and promotions. Lots of women are there the whole time, working at mid-level jobs while raising a family, but get passed over for higher positions. Many women are unwilling to work the long hours required to advance in some companies and so take less prestigious career tracks. (This happens in the culinary world, too, Hamilton notes: "Women have self-selected out of the chef life, which can grind you to a powder, and have become happily married recipe testers and magazine editors.")

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Chapter 20: Roman Holiday

Balance has been a tricky topic in the life (as we know it) of Gabrielle Hamilton. And it's no different as we sum up her book, "Blood, Bones and Butter." Starting off with a ride to the airport to begin their annual Italian getaway to Michele's family, Gabrielle begins to pick at the sides she balances on, already frustrated with a lack of connection and a surplus of small talk.

Click here for spoilers and more on the ending of the book...

The lack of balance and the rushed need to change and break-free are our themes as we round-out chapter 20. Gabrielle longs for a deeper connection with her enigma, her Italian doctor. What she gets is small talk and petty conversation. His underemphasis their relationship; her over-dramatization of it. They fail to meet in a healthy middle; they fail to balance.

Her time in Italy becomes tainted to. An explorer at heart, a restless spirit, Gabrielle images what her time could be if life was different, and begins tearing at the metaphorical shackles that keep her from that. The villa becomes more of a deterrence than a holiday. The need to impress the family and understand them takes less of a primary role in her heart. She finally gets to create her family dinner and it's met with confusion, less thanks and a sickly mother-in-law. Nothing is what it should be at this point in the game. The tipping point is Alda's sickness.

"It's Alda who is invoked as the reason nothing can change or be different," she mentions of the simple task of cleaning the house. But, so much more it stands for the reason this family is frozen in time, as many large families tend to be. As a loner, a free spirit, Gabrielle aches to move on, but the family, stapled to their matriarch, aches for time to stop, the bushes to keep encasing the house, and the food to remain the same recipes they devoured in childhood, with no interference from the outside world.

Gabrielle longs to break free, and takes her chance, beginning with a vigorous cleaning, scrubbing and de-cluttering of the villa and moving outward toward her own life. Does this actually help the Italians? Probably not. But she's set free of the shackles she's created for herself. The beautiful shackles of an attractive doctor of a husband and an almost-suburban family life with long vacations in Italy; the illusion is finished.

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@ LoriFradkin : 'Why didn't we say, If you want your cooking career to recognized, be a cook! Cook, ladies, cook." -Gabrielle Hamilton

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Chapter 19: A Pork Store Grows in Brooklyn

Welcome to Chapter 19. We're nearing the end of Gabrielle Hamilton's book and, unfortunately, the end of her marriage to her Italian stallion, Michele. This chapter edges in on the problems between them, and some personal realizations in Gabrielle's life: as well as a reluctant chef, she is reluctantly important to other people.

Click below to read spoilers, discussion points and reading themes...

Gabrielle, Michele and their family are living in Brooklyn at this point in their lives. She's understandably frustrated with the diving of their time between themselves, the family and their personal initiatives. Her blood sugar is acting up and in a few moments of completely open and unabashed honestly, she digs into the relationship, the rights, the wrongs, her fears, her regrets, her totally red-blooded anger. She's open with herself about her displeasure of her living situation, her displeasure with the people around her, even people she doesn't know. She voices, almost hysterically, a tirade against couples on the street, enjoying a quick brunch in gentrified neighborhoods of Brooklyn, but when anger like this surfaces, it's seldom about the person on the street and more honestly about the anger within and toward yourself.

- Annemarie

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Food and Wine has a great story here:

Here's a short bit from their post, "A Mentor Named Misty: After nearly 20 years of working in restaurants, she'd sworn off professional kitchens. Then she met Misty Callies. Here, Gabrielle Hamilton explains how one woman made her the chef she is today."

Head over to their site to read the whole thing.

When I met Misty Callies, my reluctant mentor, who inadvertently shaped me into the chef I am now, I'd left New York City, paradoxically, to escape from cooking. After soldiering through nearly 20 years in second-rate kitchens, starting as a 12-year-old dishwasher at a tourist restaurant in my Pennsylvania hometown, I had somehow gotten a spot in the master's program in fiction writing at the University of Michigan. So, in 1995, I packed a U-Haul and rolled into Ann Arbor to start a new, clean-fingernailed life.

I unpacked the U-Haul, registered for classes and immediately took a part-time job cooking to help pay the rent. When Misty hired me, she was grilling boneless chicken breasts for a U of M tailgate party, wearing a stained V-neck T-shirt. Not more than 10 years my senior, she was the tired, taciturn, slightly beaten chef of a perfectly decent catering company in a university football town where grown men wear maize-and-blue parkas and golf socks and will not venture beyond salmon and filet mignon, cooked to death and preferably covered with melted cheese.

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@ NOWNESS : Author of Blood, Bones and Butter, Gabrielle Hamilton shares her passion for Italian food in today’s feature http://t.co/6dru9TTb

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Chapter 18: Salty Ravioli and Rome

As we near the end of the book, we begin to dive into Gabrielle's relationship with her former husband, Michele. Often described as a passionately and unapologetic Italian man, I could appreciate this, coming from a family straight out of Naples. Gabrielle didn't seem to find a lot of his unapologetic Italian behaviour as humorous as I did (from my seat as a reader) and I think it was a fine analogy for what she probably goes through herself, and what a lot of us go through: the idyllic stereotypes of the alluring Italian, the pragmatic chef, the ideals we could not ever possibly live up to.

Click below to dive into chapter 18...

From the very beginning of the section, we see Michele's feelings toward Gabrielle. He makes her a very special ravioli meal, driving on his bike across Manhattan to procure the ingredients. Painstakingly putting them together like an artist working with delicate materials. Gabrielle describes the ravioli's as "profoundly beautiful."

"They were small and delicate and a beautiful yellow from the yolks in the pasta dough and you could see the herbs and the ricotta through the dough, like a woman behind a shower curtain."

Michele's ravioli, fragile, transparent, messy, watched over with care, aptly describe his feelings toward Gabrielle at this time. She was, as we touched upon above, this idyllic woman behind the curtain. The chef at the stove, matching his thoughts of his mother, maybe of what a woman should be: a nurturer, a caretaker. But, of course, this isn't the Gabrielle we've come to know after 18 chapters and countless Kindle swipes. She's complicated and nervy and strong and stubborn. She's a realistic impersonation of every other real life person, not a delicate piece of pasta, not the perfect representation of the chef at the helm of her pastel restaurant.

Alda, Michele's mother, comes into the story 74% of the way in and never leaves. Indeed, she's got staying power not only in the pages of this autobiography, but in Gabrielle's life. And I think we've all got someone like that; however brief their appearance actually was, they're always a shadow in our minds. The in-person relationship with Alda begins, and ends later on in another chapter, with food, with cooking and preparation, and feeling ingredients and the clanking of large misshapen pots. It's more honest than many of the other relationships in Gabrielle's life at this point, which could lead to the strong feelings she notes from here until the very end of the book.

Outside of Rome we meet Michele's family villa. Gabrielle describes it as a place that was once beautiful and now stands in slight disarray, wild and crumbling slightly, but with a wide open ceiling and a startlingly beautiful view of the cloud-filled blue sky, filled with stars at night. This house will be the setting for many family dinners, many realizations of Gabrielle's own feelings toward family life, and, in one way, the beginning of the end of her current family situation. Being the central location for all of Michele's family, it acts as the glue that holds this wide group of people together -- and she clamors and begs to be stuck in the glue, too. She begs Michele with urgency to hosts dinners, to hold events, to cater to the family, and he continually declines. It's too much for him, it's too much for Alda. Gabrielle never gets to play host in that family home and as a consequence, never feels like more than a guest with that family.

One of the best moments of the chapter comes when we meet the "toothless vecchio." (Vecchio in Italian meaning "old" literally, or simply put, a humorously aged old man.) Finding him and his small cart of zucchini flowers and slightly bruised fresh vegetables, she recalls her experiences at the local Roman farmer's markets, and her own back in New York. Previously mentioned, growing up in a family of Italian natives, we grew our own vegetables and to this day I cannot stand to push through the styled organic crowds to the overpriced urban-grown vegetables at one of the popular markets in Williamsburg or Union Square. And that's why this hysterical passage hit me so close to the heart:

"It's the toothless vecchio who makes my pants pound, not Alfonso over there with the hair gel. He has his American counterparts, Mr. Gucci sunglasses does. The "chicks" and "dudes" who drove me from the farmer's market years ago. I love the vegetables but I can't go near the place. There's always the girl with the bicycle, wandering along from stall to stall with two apples, a bouquet of lavender, and one bell pepper in the basket of her bicycle. A teeming throng of New Yorkers tries to push past her to get to the vegetables for sale, but she shifts her ass from side to side, admiring the way her purchases are artfully arranged for all to see in the basket of her bike."

Back at the villa, Gabrielle begins describing the deterioration of the home, her family relationships and her marriage. As always, this is all described through food, and there's a particularly sad episode with a plate that Alda hands her while they work together. It's been sitting around for awhile, between cups and pasta and other dry ingredients, and Gabrielle looks upon it sadly, stale and upsetting in her mind, and can't bring herself to eat it. But, I suspect it was more the atmosphere she felt with herself and this family than the meal that she couldn't stomach. After all, she had been eating deliriously out of that same cabinet for the better part of her time there. Along with this meal, she thinks back to the ravioli from the top of the chapter. This beautiful ravioli that she also painstakingly took care of after Michele had given her reign over them. A gorgeous meal she served on family night at Prune; when she tried to eat them, as attractive and transparent as they were, they were simply too salty.

What did the ravioli mean to you in this chapter? Have you ever looked back on a situation in life, and assessed it through different eyes?

More importantly, who, now, also wants a toothless vecchio?

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An Afternoon at Prune

After finishing the book, the HuffPost Books editors decided to go for a quick lunch at Gabrielle Hamilton's restaurant Prune -- we couldn't resist! Here's the Classic New York Deli Sandwich, the Ratatouille Sandwich and a celery primer.

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2 out of 2 dieting Book Club editors agree.

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EXCERPT: Chapter 16!

If you're thinking of picking up 'Blood, Bones and Butter' but haven't for whatever reason, here's a snippet to nudge you in the right direction. It's from Chapter 16, one of the favorite chapters of the HuffPost Book Club, and a topic that sparked a lot of discussion from readers.

"On the early morning train ride up, bleary-eyed, short on sleep by a critical several hours, I was thinking about what a particularly hard time I have had with women in my industry. When I was coming up in kitchens I was not the first or only woman in the kitchen. I was frequently the second woman; the “other” woman. There is nothing worse, I think, than being in an all-male kitchen with only one other female. Invariably, with so much territory at stake, she will treat you worse than any of the men.When I am asked to wax rhapsodic about the virtues of women in a kitchen, I feel claustrophobic and hemmed in by the task. But that was so many years ago.

Now, I imagined what a bust the conference would be. Letting my mind roll over my own payroll, female after female after female — from general manager to bar manager to sous chef to pastry chef to owner to server — I couldn’t imagine that we were still having this conversation, this draining, polarizing conversation about where the women are in the industry. When I opened my own restaurant, nearly ten years ago, I finally put to bed that whole business about being a woman in a male-dominated profession. I was so obviously in charge that I didn’t even need to say it. I unlocked the gate and the office in the morning and brewed the coffee. I wrote the menu, cut the checks, posted the prep list, cooked the food, and locked the door at the end of the night. Men who came to work at Prune understood at the threshold that there was a woman in charge, and all of them worked each shift, virility intact, without needing to challenge that. I received five resumes a week from young women entering the field, evidently not deterred by the reputation of the industry. Surely this stuff is over, I thought, finding my seat on the train. This topic’s a dinosaur. Was it really necessary to get a chef who had worked late in her kitchen the night before out of her bed at such an hour in order to get to the up-state New York campus to talk about this all day long starting at nine a.m.?"

Click here for the rest.

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@ jmacGGA : "There are two things you should never do with your father: learn how to drive and learn how to kill a chicken" #HPBookClub

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@ IrisBlasi : Just got to the Prune part of BLOOD, BONES & BUTTER and plan on gobbling up the rest before #hpbookclub. #fridayreads

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Chapter 17

Chapter 17 brings us to the "Butter" portion of the book, which seems a pertinent time to reexamine the memoir's structure. Presumably, "Blood" refers to family, whereas "Bones refers to the grunt work, the inadvertent ladder climbing. So what does "Butter" represent? The proverbial cherry on top of Gabrielle's hard work?

"We were settling in, like butter on toast, to our annual July vacation," she writes. "We" means her, her husband, Michele (who she seems as reluctant about as she was about her career), and her two kids.

They're in Leuca, an Italian seaside town which, as you can see, is breathtaking.

We're introduced to Carmeluccia, "the help," a sturdy housemaid who Gabrielle describes as a typical Italian working woman: She's a charmer when it comes to kids, she's most comfortable in the kitchen and she can make perfect dough sans oil and salt. She uses simply flour and water.

Our narrator is in awe, and it seems she'd identify strongly with this woman if it weren't for the language barrier. She uses this as an opportunity to discuss her confusion with her own heritage -- were they bourgeoisie or were they, too, "the help"? The newly emerging career of the celebrity chef, and her transformation from a floor-mopper to a high-status artist, also bewilders her.

She notes the interactions Michele's mother has with her fellow townspeople, trading fertilizer for wheat, and she envies their candid exchanges.

"I can't tell if I am just learning how to make orecchiette, or if I am learning how to be the woman who keeps the sack of keys," she writes.

-Madeleine

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Chapter 16

In Chapter 16, Gabrielle is invited to the Culinary Institute of America to speak on a panel called "Where Are the Women?" She's reluctant, saying the topic is a "dinosaur." She thinks (and rightfully so!) that she's carved out a place for herself in the industry just fine.

"I was so obviously in charge that I didn't even need to say it," she writes. She also says she received at least five resumes a week from aspiring young female chefs, obviously not deterred by the food world's stereotypes.

While reading the prepared questions for the panel, nervousness sets in. Gabrielle notes her lack of experience climbing a ladder or formally choosing a career -- what advice could she, a reluctant chef, possibly offer?

As it turned out, very little. Gabrielle quickly grew emotional over the direction of the conversation.

She thought she could ally with her fellow, deserved female chefs to work against the "entitled" students who aspired to be "famous," Food Network stars. She also thought she could answer questions such as, "Is it okay to cry?" with strength and finesse - if an applicant to her restaurant addresses their cover letter with "Sir," she "won't cry. [She] just won't hire them."

But the other panelists did not share her point of view, and instead took a more polarizing route, announcing "women have better palates than men," and "women are more nurturing than men."

This talk made a chink in Gabrielle's armor. Though she contained her frustrated tears during the talk, she did cry during the train ride home.

Our Women's Editor, Margaret Wheeler Johnson has her own thoughts regarding the question of women chefs.

Do you agree? Is this a trite conversation, or one that needs more attention?

-Madeleine

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Read Chapter 16 - and a response to it

In chapter 16, Gabrielle attends a panel about professional chefs called "Where are all the women?"

We've reproduced Chapter 16 in its entirety so that we can open its ideas to a wider audience.

HuffPost Women's editor Margaret Wheeler Johnson writes about her responses to the chapter here.

What do you think about the issues it raises?

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Chapter 15 - On not wanting to be a "badass"

Another tough series of circumstances for Gabrielle to deal with.

Again, a killer opening. "Every time I get pregnant..."

And again, a difficult time both personally and emotionally for Gabrielle, while a heavily pregnant having to deal with a fake heart attack, the death of her brother, and the resignation of a line cook all coming within a page and a half.

When the line cook opens his explanation as to why he is taking a different job because it is hardly any hours of work and triple the pay, she says "This is exactly as much as I need to hear. He is dead to me."

She is angry that he didn't lie and tell them to wait six months, that he didn't turn it down, that he is leaving because he has no option. She sees his decision as a betrayal, and this is repeated when another chef says she is leaving soon afterwards.

Gabrielle swears at her, goes into her office and books an induced labor. The opposite of her natural, simple vision for food.

She writes a to-do list, something she says she does compulsively. The one she shares is very human and very funny. Our sympathies swing back and forth in this chapter, we're with her for some of it, and probably not for other parts.

When she starts to talk about being seen as "badass" - and how that is "a juvenile aspiration," we suddenly get a moment of introspection, looking back at the memories she has shared in the first third of the book. This book is filled with very human moments, what feels like raw confessions combined with emotional honesty despite how these might appear - mixed in with justifications and what reads like still-burning anger.

"When you are the one throwing the party every night... it will leave its marks," she says.

Certainly, the carefree tearaway of the first third of the book is long gone. How would you describe the personality that is portrayed, and has replaced it?

-- Andrew

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From a reader who says he "loved" the book but...

@ parkslopepub : gabrielle seemed to love hubby's italian family more than she loved hubby #hpbookclub

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Want to meet Gabrielle Hamilton and the HuffPost Books team?

Yes, you do.

We're hosting a FREE event with our lovely friends at the Word bookstore in Brooklyn on Sunday, March 18th at 7pm. All the details are here, and also click that link to reserve your place.

It's going to be a great evening of Bloody, Bone-crunchingly Buttered conversation.

Come along!

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Never let it be said that you don't learn anything in the #HPBookClub...

@ kmlb09 : I had no idea that it takes a lobster 15+ yrs to grow to 3lbs. I have a whole new appreciation for those lil' guys. #HPBookClub

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Chapter 14 - The visit to her mother

It's a showdown of a most curious kind.

Having stated that neither mutual love, nor her husband's personality are good reasons for them to stay together, it's something of a jolt to learn that Gabrielle is pregnant - and "with our first son", so it's clear more are to follow.

And suddenly, in passing, after idiolizing Michele's mother, she mentions that she hasn't talked to her own mother for more than twenty years, "the very heartbeat of the most cherished period of my life."

She says she "feels better without her." Following the early chapters, and with such an aching embrace of her Italian adopted family to come, there's much to ponder about this. It's hard not to wonder if the abandonement described early on had a lasting impact on Gabrielle - but then, this is the only information we are given, and we discover in this chapter that her now-aged mother is a complicated personality.

Also thrown in casually is the phrase "We were then still living separately" - despite being married and having a child, Gabrielle and Michele do not share an apartment. For a book that is so open about its emotions, it carefully keeps certain facts, and any discussion of unconventional choices, far from our gaze. Indeed, they pass the coming car journey him in the front, her in the back, separate, in the same space, but far from comfortable with each other.

However, despite such quiet bombshells, the chapter has a very entertaining, and so-crazy-it-has-to-honest tale of Michele delaying taking his wife in labor to hospital until he has showered and decided which tie to wear - perhaps the clearest indication throughout the book how infuriating he probably can be at certain moments. Gabrielle loves the Italian devotion to ritual, but sometimes it can be a little impractical.

What he thinks about the book hasn't been recorded anywhere that we know of - if he has read it at all.

The drive is excruciating to read about, silent, separated, and filled with dread in Gabrielle's mind. The strain of family is palpable, and easy to relate to. This is the constant refrain of children grown up, to be embarrassed of our parents, who it turns out are human, frail, flawed, vainglorious, filled with shameful ideas and odd habits that we might tolerate in others, but in our own parents, who we worshipped as children and are now fallen deities, we have little patience for their foibles. Worse is if they still treat us as children, aching to see that glimmer of worship return to our eyes, even as they increasingly are the ones who need to be looked after by us.

And yet her mother is gracious and friendly, and Michele warms to her - which only seems to increase Gabrielle's frustration at him.

She describes her mother, who is up early and peering through their bedroom window, as "rubbing her six hairy legs together with hungry impatience."

And yet when he sees her, he looks over at what Gabrielle describes as "something vaguely resembling friendship for the first time in what feels like five years."

This is not a happy time, place or gathering for Gabrielle. Indeed, following such reckless joy in the first half of the book, it's hard to identify much pleasure in her daily life, beyond her visits with her mother in law - which later become stifling for her as well.

She describes her mother as "detestable" - yet then does question that herself, "What is there to detest?" Her mother's cooking - roasting two birds herself on a wood-burning stove - is not described in any detail, nothing about the preparation or the herbs or the oil, merely criticized: "one would've stretched."

In the end, a kind of realization seems to strike Gabrielle, and her mother seems to be more pitied than despised.

Yet shortly before the chapter ends, she describes her mother's snobbery and superior attitude, saying that she has been "trying for twenty years to rid myself of this Gallic snobbism." Yet is her idealization of Italy so very different? Let us know what you think in the comments.

-- Andrew

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Chapter 13 - short and brutally honest

Chapter 13 - the shortest chapter in the book.

It's a strange read, on the back of a fairly disastrous honeymoon. Like so many chapters, the opening line is telling: "So I came to possess, of all things, a husband."

More below.

"Possess" is an interesting choice of verb, and she says that it didn't make any sense to her until she met Michele's mother.

Alda embodies everything about cooking that Gabrielle enjoys - simplicity, instinct, fresh and local ingredients, far from hygiene inspectors or regulations. She calls Alda "a very compelling reason" to stay married to Michele.

While it's wonderful to share in the joy she has for her mother in law, such honest yet brutal phrasing makes it clear that the marriage is far from a conventional one - nor one, with the hindsight of the narrator, that seems destined for success.

-- Andrew

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We got tweeted at by culinary royalty!

@ TravelingAnna : RT @nigella_lawson: RT @IrisBlasi: The only thing better than reading BLOOD, BONES & BUTTER would be reading it at Prune. #hpbookclub

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Now THAT'S the way to enjoy the #HPBookClub...

@ kmlb09 : Sitting on my deck, enjoying this 60 degree #Colorado weather with a glass of Sauvignon Blanc & my #HPBookClub book. #perfect

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Ch. 12-Zoë

Gabrielle meets her husband, Michele.

He had been going to a crappy Italian restaurant around the block, and finally decides to try Prune. According to Gabrielle, he falls in love with lots of different waitresses before he set his eyes on her. Her description of the budding relationship is far from romantic:

"I think he was like the teenage girl who falls in love with the drummer in the band--she loves the music, the smoke, the light show, the emotion conjured in her own self, and there at the back of the stage, keeping the whole thing running is the drummer. She decides it's him she wants."

She goes on, "How utterly perfect, then, to meet up with an equally ambitious, hardworking heterosexual male for whom I would probably never feel much more than warm affection. How unthreatening." Ouch. It might be very harsh, but at least she's being honest? This proves yet again how hesitant I am to read into anything here.

She decides that it's too difficult to break up with her girlfriend, and so starts an affair with Michele. She describes the difficulty of having an affair in the restaurant business, as there is barely time to maintain ONE relationship, let alone two. It doesn't seem like she's delusional, thinking she isn't doing anything wrong. After all, she notes, "Having an affair, no matter how enlightened and forward-thinking the feminist you are, is still an act of hostility, usually retaliatory."

Eventually, Michele admits he needs a green card to stay in the country, and says that he is very much in love with Gabrielle and wants to get married. She agrees to. She ends things with her girlfriend, and marries Michele.

Gabrielle says that their wedding is one of the best she has ever been to, but she remains unhappy and unconvinced about her choice. According to her, they spend most of their honeymoon apart and miserable.

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Ch. 11-Zoë

Chapter 11 focuses on Gabrielle's relationship with her sister, Melissa.

She writes, "She's the only one in my family who's held on tight to me, and I will never let go of her." Melissa tells Gabrielle everything, and sleeps at her place three nights a week. Melissa invites a renowned French chef, Soltner, to cook with her. Soltner cooks very classically, and makes a very simple, but delicious omlette. Gabrielle is reminded of her roots and her goals as a chef: to make simple dishes perfectly. Though she had been tempted by food fads, she gets her mind back on track after the Soltner experience.

This chapter made me a bit uncomfortable, in light of gossip about Gabrielle's affair with Melissa's husband. Gabrielle made her life very public with this memoir, and I'm sure at times like these, it has worked against her. In many ways, it feels that this is none of the reader's business, and I certainly didn't judge a situation that I know absolutely nothing about. But after someone publishes a very public memoir about intimate, private parts of their lives, I think it's only natural for people to want to know how and what they're doing now. Reality television stars are reported on long after they stop being on TV. Should it be the same for memoirists? Should a once-public life ALWAYS be public? Let me know what you think in the comments!

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Zoë's thoughts on the book thus far, as well as thoughts on analyzing non-fiction:

I really love this book.

I was actually the one who recommended this choice for book club. I think Gabrielle is a brilliant writer, and she's honest and funny.

Admittedly, I haven't finished the book yet because I like to read along at the book club pace. I hear she gets a bit less likable later in the memoir, which is hard for me to imagine since I find myself rooting for her so much right now.

Her descriptions and diction are simply beautiful. I have to say, I think this is one of my favorite works on non-fiction that I've read in awhile, and certainly my favorite memoir.

I find analyzing non-fiction quite difficult. I like to take non-fiction author more literally, since their stories are supposed to be true. I feel like there may be fewer literary tropes that one can use in non-fiction because we're supposed to take the author at face value. I think many non-fiction authors have trouble refraining from being dry for this reason. They're simply not allowed as much flourish as fiction is, because then their work might be questioned as being 100% accurate. While I don't find this to be the case with Gabrielle's work, as it is anything but dry, I do hesitate to analyze anything. It feels too personal, more like psychological analysis than literary analysis.

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Chapter 10-Zoë

In this chapter, Gabrielle essentially describes that being in the restaurant business isn't easy.

Arlindo, a man who lives in the building that her restaurant is in, constantly bothers her and stands outside topless. Sunday brunch is ridiculously packed and incredibly difficult to work. A woman who lives in the building constantly complains about how loud the music is. The kitchen can, at times, smell horrible and it's always unbearably hot. On top of it all, it's an utterly exhausting business.

Despite her tons of complaints, her writing is so brilliant and hilarious that I don't even notice it. I actually ENJOY reading the complaints.

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Comments

[Jodi Lampert]

07:22 PM on 03/04/2012

It took me a while to get into this book, but once she's opened the restaurant, it's flying!! Kind of a surprise, she married a guy.. but he's Italian, AND brought her cheese, so, of course!!

[Annemarie Dooling]

01:31 PM on 03/05/2012

Just shows that no one can resist Italians with cheese!

[Jodi Lampert]

10:22 AM on 03/09/2012

I think there's a T-shirt waiting to happen!!