Elena Bowes speaks to renowned food writer Ruth Reichl about her latest bestseller The Paris Novel. Reichl wrote her first cookbook at twenty-three in 1971 and has been writing about food ever since. She was the restaurant critic for the LA Times, then the NY Times, where a bad review could shutter a restaurant. From there she joined Gourmet Magazine as editor-in-chief for ten years until it closed in 2009. She has written twelve books, including several cookbooks, five memoirs and two novels. The Paris Novel is her second novel.
The novel is an enchanting love letter to the world’s most romantic city, where the simple, sensual pleasures of life – food, wine, fashion, art, and architecture – abound.
In The Paris Novel, a young woman named Stella has had a difficult start to life in Manhattan thanks to her deeply narcissistic and sexy mother Celia and a predatory older man named Mortimer. To cope with her traumatic upbringing, Stella lives a very controlled, friendless, joyless existence. But all that changes when Celia dies unexpectedly and her will orders Stella to go to Paris for reasons undisclosed.
In your Substack column, La Briffe, you identify yourself as writer, cook, eater. How do you prioritise those?
Writing is who I am. I grew up in publishing. My father was a book designer. I wrote my first book when I was in third grade. Writing is always how I’ve thought of myself. And cooking is my passion. It’s my happy place. One of my books, My Kitchen Year, was about how cooking literally saved my life after Gourmet closed. I was sure it was the end of my life, my career. I was going to be a bag lady. Cooking grounded me and got me back to being myself. And eating, I love to eat.
I read that your mother once said, “all you do is write about food.” Was she proud of you?
Was my mother proud of me? She was proud that I was writing, but she wasn’t proud that I was writing about food. She had utter disdain for being a restaurant critic. She said all you’re doing is telling rich people where to eat. When are you going to do something worthwhile with your life? I genuinely believe that food is important, and that your food choices really matter. They have a huge impact on the environment, our health and wellbeing.
Where did the idea for the book come from?
There’s a chapter in my memoir Save Me the Plums where I go into a vintage clothing store in Paris and try on this dress, which transforms me completely. I became a fabulous creature who I never imagined I could be. I desperately wanted that dress. The sales lady said, “this is your dress.” “How much is it?” I asked. And when she said it was €6,000, I didn’t buy it. After the memoir was done, my editor said, “I love that little black dress chapter so much. Could you imagine a novel where the character does buy the dress?” And the moment she said that the book pretty much came to me fully formed.
And so, was it easy to write?
I loathe writing, as many writers do. I love having written, but I really hate writing. The only thing I have ever enjoyed writing is this book. I wrote it for longer than I really needed to because I didn’t want to give the characters up. And then when I handed it in, I had this Aha! moment where I thought, I really want to know what happens to these characters next. So, I’m writing a sequel.
Fantastic. I can’t wait. The book is set in 1983. Why?
That was a wonderful time for Americans to be in Paris. When you travel today, you’re never really away. You never get lost anymore. You take your iPhone with you. But in 1983, when you went to Paris, you were away. You were not in contact with your ordinary life.
I also really wanted to give access to the Paris of the 1920s with Hemingway, Cocteau, Fitzgerald, and Picasso. And so, the character Jules brings that all in. He was in his eighties, he knew everyone, and he was alive before the wars.
That’s very cool. Can you tell us about the Shakespeare & Company bookshop, and its eccentric proprietor that appears in your novel.
Shakespeare & Company is legendary. If you were a young American going to Paris it was just part of what you did. And (its owner) George Whitman… the idea that he hasn’t walked through a million novels is amazing to me. He’s such a great character.
He went to Paris on the GI bill. For some reason the US army decided that all the guys who waded ashore on D-day needed books and they gave them vouchers. Now, you can imagine that most of the guys in the army weren’t all that crazy to have books. And so, George started collecting all these vouchers and he filled his hotel room with books. He genuinely believed literature is necessary for people. His policy was take what you need, pay what you can.
And then as people started coming into his shop and they had no place to stay, he would say, well, you can sleep in the shop. He called them Tumbleweeds. And over the years, over 30,000 people have slept in Shakespeare & Company. He was just an amazing, eccentric guy. He cut his hair by burning it with matches.
I loved the Wiser than Me podcast episode with you and Julia Louis Dreyfus. In it you say it’s important to face your fears. Why?
I think when something really scares you, you should do it. The secret to staying young is doing things you don’t know how to do. Every really significant thing that has changed my life was something that terrified me and I lost sleep over and didn’t want to do and have been glad I did it.
There are dozens of examples. The time I was at Gourmet, we ran a David Foster Wallace piece called “Consider the Lobster”. I thought I was going to get fired for that, and it turned out to be the best thing we ever did. It’s a bioethics piece about what lobsters feel when they go into the pot. What is the morality of eating living creatures? Hundreds and hundreds wrote in and said thank you for giving us this thoughtful piece. And what it told us is that we were underestimating our readers, and that we could and should write about anything. From that moment on we did serious pieces, like about how the people picking tomatoes in Florida are slaves. We started to be a change agent.
What advice would you give a wannabe food writer?
You know, I was so lucky with my career because I was about two seconds ahead of the zeitgeist. I got to learn on the job. You can’t do that now. Everybody wants to be a food writer. I would say read as much food writing as you can. Try and describe everything you’re eating to yourself. The truth is we have very few words for flavour in the English language, so you must go beyond flavour. Try and figure out how to make someone really taste it (with words). And thirdly, try and become an expert on something that no one else is. So, if somebody is writing an article on oysters, they have to come to you because you’re the expert.
Where are you excited to travel to next?
I’m dying to go to South Korea. I’m dying to go back to China. And I’m desperate to go to Taiwan, which I have never been to. The food in Taiwan is different from mainland China for two reasons. During the Chinese Revolution all the real cooking stopped there. There were no more chefs’ schools. The chefs were all sent to do other things. The great tradition of Chinese came to an abrupt halt in mainland China for thirty years.
Meanwhile, Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek took the chefs when he fled to Taiwan in 1949. Taiwan was greatly influenced by Japan because Taiwan was occupied by the Japanese for a long time. So, the food in Taiwan also has this Japanese influence. The food is supposed to be just fabulous.
You can listen to the full interview on Elena’s podcast Elena Meets the Author.