The last book left in my True Books 2020 Challenge this year was Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton. I rescued this memoir off my husband's donate pile when he was reorganizing his books ages ago. I was initially drawn to it because of the high praise it received from Anthony Bourdain, who called it, "the best memoir by a chef ever." I was also curious to see what kind of struggles Hamilton might have had to face as a woman trying to succeed in the male-dominated culinary world. Happy to read something shorter and less dense than my last few picks have been, I got started.
The memoir begins with Hamilton's unconventional childhood with a pair of artsy, bohemian parents. Her French mother introduced her to all sorts of simple, fresh foods, immaculately prepared. Rather than the traditional kid fare of chicken nuggets and mac and cheese, Hamilton grew up eating classic, simple dishes with ingredients like olives, sardines, rabbit, and fiddleheads. She spent her days playing with her siblings in their large, secluded home in the forest, and attending a series of elaborate parties hosted by her parents each year. She lived this way quite happily until her parents divorced when she was a young teenager. From that point forward, she became fiercely independent. She lied about her age in order to take a series of restaurant jobs, in which she gradually moved from washing dishes, to prepping food, to serving in a bar. As she moved around from place to place after finishing high school, working with food was a constant in her life. Even so, she wasn't nurturing any ambitions to become a chef as a young adult. Food was simply her comfort zone and a reliable way to bring in money.
Her memoir skips around a bit from there as she recounts the path that led her towards opening a restaurant. She spent time working a series of high-end catering jobs and worked for several years as the chef at a children's summer camp. She also spent some time backpacking across Europe, where she learned about all different sorts of cuisines. A brief moment of dissatisfaction with her career path led her to enroll in a college and get her MFA in creative writing, but she returned to food jobs soon after that was over. Eventually, an acquaintance mentioned an empty café space he had for sale, and she decided to take the plunge and open Prune, her own restaurant. She served the simple kind of food with classic ingredients she ate growing up and it was an immediate success.
The final section of the memoir deals mostly with her meeting and marrying her husband and having her two sons. Her marriage is unconventional and largely unhappy, but she does enjoy interacting with her husband's Italian family. They own a large villa in Italy, and her trips there over the summer further expand her culinary education.
Much like with the last few novels I've read this month, I felt split on this one. On the positive side, the first half was quite interesting and engaging. I enjoyed seeing Hamilton's weird and risky adolescence and the beginnings of her career. Her writing was often vivid and beautiful, especially when she was describing food. There were a lot of passages in here that made me and curious to try different meals. This was also a relatively quick read, which was something I definitely needed after making my way through some longer books recently.
On the negative side, I felt like this memoir lacked a strong narrative flow. Chunks of Hamilton's life and career are completely skipped over, leaving me wondering about what happened in the missing sections. For example, in one chapter she describes opening her restaurant for the first time, then the next chapter abruptly picks back up with it being wildly successful. There were a lot of moments like this, where she'd be doing something like appearing on Martha Stewart or speaking at the Culinary Institutes of America with absolutely no explanation as to what led up to these opportunities. As a result, the story felt incomplete. The second half of the memoir, which dealt largely with her ill-fated and extremely depressing marriage, really drifted away from food and was dreary to get through. It actually made me quite sad for her, as I can't imagine living the strange, loveless life she did for so long. It wasn't what I was expecting or looking for in a memoir about the rise of a chef.
On top of this, her general attitude and demeanor seemed to grow increasingly entitled and arrogant throughout the story. At one point, she tells an anecdote about how she blocked a bus stop so she could sit in her car with her husband and drink beers and eat salami sandwiches. She literally describes elderly people struggling to walk around her car to board the bus like readers are supposed to think this is cute or endearing. It was neither. Once I realized that I did not enjoy Hamilton's personality, it limited how interested I could be in her story. She's far from the world's worst person, but there were enough moments where she behaved in a spoiled or self-contradictory way that I was mildly irritated with her a lot throughout my reading.
In the end, I think the biggest drawback for me ended up being her position (or lack thereof) on women succeeding in the culinary world. She only addresses this in one chapter, and it is a complete mess of contradictions. She goes from believing that women have no problems in the profession anymore, to regarding women who take jobs at food magazines in order to spend more time with their families as being quitters who will never be successful, to believing that she did have to work harder sometimes to keep up with the guys, to crying about not being at home with her babies in the space of ten pages or so. I suppose being a woman in a traditionally male field is tough because other women are frequently going to look to you as some kind of role model or expert on how to succeed, even when you don't have opinions or advice to give. Hamilton really does not. She went from working in catering to owning her own restaurant. She didn't have to struggle under male chefs in culinary school or other restaurants as she worked her way up. Her experience wasn't easy, but it wasn't riddled with institutional sexism either. I can't blame her for that, but I do wish she had left the topic out entirely. The chapter devoted to it was not satisfying to read and not flattering to her.
So while I obviously had some issues with this one, it was certainly engaging enough to keep my attention. I feel like if it were any longer, my review might be different. As it was however, Blood, Bones, and Butter was a quick read about a world that I know very little about. It was interesting to see how Gabrielle Hamilton made her way to the top of the food world, even if she took an unconventional path and even if her personality rubbed me the wrong way at times. Despite all the picky things I have to say about it, I did ultimately enjoy the novel more than I disliked it.
As I mentioned at the top of this review, this was the last book in my True Books 2020 Challenge! I definitely succeeded in my goal to read more nonfiction this year. I'm so pleased to have finished this one successfully.
Challenge Tally
True Books 2020: 14/14 - Complete!
Total Books Read in 2020: 75
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