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 I was really, really excited to read Lucy Knisley’s Relish. I’ve been a fan of her web presence for a pretty long time. I think her art is really sweet and I think she makes funny, touching observations and, though I have rarely experienced the things she writes about, they’re no less relatable or interesting.
Unfortunately, Relish didn’t feel like her autobiographical webcomic Stop Paying Attention. Perhaps it is a problem exclusive to her books — I haven’t yet read French Milk — but the whole of Relish felt pretentious and pompous and snooty. (I know those are basically synonyms but it deserves all three — “pretentious” for her superiority complex, “pompous” for the near-explicit sense of “anyone who doesn’t eat like me is unworthy” and “snooty” for her constant need to point out that cheap, quick food is “bad” even when she is talking about how much she likes it.
I know this is autobiography and I know that autobiographies are a very tight lens through which to see and express the world and I know that it can sometimes make for a very limited scope, but I would have loved to see adult Lucy perhaps realizing that the way she grew up and her relationship with food is a highly, highly privileged one.
Food is a political issue and it will remain a political issue until all people have access to high quality food that they can afford and I believe it to be a genuine failure on Knisley’s part to never in the entire scope of the book address that. She takes the time to let her readers know that she liked McDonald’s even though it’s “considered cheap and unhealthy” and in the same page devotes a panel to fat people picketing McDonald’s for making them fat, but never addresses any of the systematic issues that bar access to good, nutritious, fresh food for great swaths of human beings across the globe.
As a fat person, this is what Lucy Knisley thinks of me. Wonderful.Politicization of food aside, I wanted to like Relish, I really really did. The art is fun and I particularly like Knisley’s rendering of place — there’s an overhead rendering from the section about her childhood trip to Mexico that I find particularly charming and I love almost every illustration of shop fronts — and I think her illustrated recipes are legit wonderful. I enjoyed the tale of the lemonade chicken and how much she appreciates sharing a meal with another person, but I spent an enormous amount of my time reading rolling my eyes and groaning. There is some gentle, but still icky othering of food she experiences while traveling that I did not enjoy, but more than that I just couldn’t stomach the pomposity of it all.
Food is wonderful and I mean that really and truly. I love to cook and I love to shop for fresh vegetables and choose the perfect piece of meat to barbecue. I love gourmet meals prepared by master chefs and a perfectly constructed Big Mac. I love to share meals with people I love and I love falling in love with people over shared meals. I feel like, at our cores, Lucy Knisley and I are probably not that different about food.
But it seems very likely that Lucy Knisley has never been one of the 2.3 million households in the United States that live in a food desert. She has likely never paid $9 a pound for defrosted “fresh” chicken. She has probably never skipped a meal so that someone else in her household could eat. And though I do not expect her — nor anyone — to apologize for the privilege of being able to eat not only regularly, but incredibly well, I do expect her to acknowledge it. How can you spend so many pages talking about the unbelievable richness and joy of your food experience and not acknowledge how lucky you are to have had it?
So, though Relish was not for me, I decided to trust Knisley’s skills and tastebuds anyway and make carbonara for my family following her recipe. Mostly.
 I am not a person who follows recipes well which has often led to genuinely grotesque meals and has taught me to avoid baking at pretty much all costs — I’m an experimenter! I like to add and subtract and never measure anything! Those are not skills for baking or recipes! — so I made sure to keep a copy of Knisley’s recipe right at hand and also to read it about a dozen times and also make my girlfriend gather all of the ingredients because she is much more meticulous than I am in the kitchen.
 We live on a strict-ish budget so the only thing I bought special was thick cut bacon (The wilds of North Dakota are not prime pancetta territory, tragically.) which means that we went without the wine (I have learned from experience that the Moscato we drink is way too sweet to cook with.), used lots of parmesan because we didn’t have any romano on hand, and used dried parsley because we are notoriously bad at not letting leftover herbs go to waste. Also, once the garlic was soft and golden and delicious, I smashed it up and added it to the egg mixture because… well, why wouldn’t you? It’s garlic.
Though I am atrociously bad at recipes, I am a better than average cook so once everything was ready and organized and sorted into little bowls like the pros do on the TV, it went super easy. Even though I was worried the illustrative nature of it might mess with me, Knisley’s recipe was not at all hard to follow.
 We decided to heat up our peas on the side and then dump them over the top of the pasta servings partly because it looked super pretty and partly because my mom doesn’t like the frozen peas we buy because they have a sort of stiff inner texture — they’re very meaty, basically — and then we sat down and everyone proceeded to stuff themselves to the point of wishing we were dead or maybe napping for a super extended period of time.
 I cannot emphasize how good this was, for real. With four people eating one of our usual pasta meals, we leave behind enough for a couple of lunch servings. This time, with only three people eating, there was nothing left in that big silver bowl when we were done.
So maybe, as a reading experience, Relish wasn’t for me and perhaps I have some serious qualms about un-broached social issues in it, but as a cookbook I have at least one great recipe — my girlfriend and I have already talked about making this again but adding onions and mushrooms and swapping peas for asparagus — and high, high hopes for the few others Knisley illustrated.
I might think twice before I buy more of Knisley’s autobiographical work, but I’ll certainly be first in line if she finds herself compelled toward an entire illustrated cookbook.
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From Amazon: Lucy Knisley loves food. The daughter of a chef and a gourmet, this talented young cartoonist comes by her obsession honestly. In her forthright, thoughtful, and funny memoir, Lucy traces key episodes in her life thus far, framed by what she was eating at the time and lessons learned about food, cooking, and life. Each chapter is bookended with an illustrated recipe—many of them treasured family dishes, and a few of them Lucy’s original inventions.
A welcome read for anyone who ever felt more passion for a sandwich than is strictly speaking proper, Relish is a graphic novel for our time: it invites the reader to celebrate food as a connection to our bodies and a connection to the earth, rather than an enemy, a compulsion, or a consumer product.
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Four months, four books read and posted about! Who knew I was capable of such stick-to-it-iveness? Almost makes me want to revisit the Festive-Ass Flicks project this year! Almost. Kind of.
In order to continue to diversify the books I read, I chose Lucy Knisley’s Relish for May’s book which is because it’s a book written by a woman and made up of pictures. Did you know people draw stuff and tell stories by putting those drawings in order and adding words? Crazy!1 I’ve been reading Knisley’s web content on and off for a long time and I’ve always found her art cheerful and her stories compelling, so what better way to expand my book horizons than to pay her some money and read her book?
So here’s the plan as always!
1. Read the book!
2. Post about it on the internet*
3. Link me to your post in the comments here
4. I’ll do a round-up post on June 1st-ish and announce the next book
5. We can have a casual-ass comment party about the book
6. REPEAT
Your site, Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, even Twitter is fine! (Just Storify and link!) Whatever works for you!
This is a very casual, kick-back, low-expectations, low-effort deal! I just like the idea of reading the same book and then hearing what people think about it. That’s literally it. FUN, YES?! Good.
If you have suggestions for the next book, please please please comment with them and tell me! I’d appreciate if it was available on Kindle, but that’s the only requirement.
Share this with people if you do it! Tell me if you’re going to do it! Tell everyone!
*Even if you don’t get the book finished and posted about by the end of the month in which we’re reading it, do it and link me anyway! I will add it to the round-up post no matter how late it is and you know I always want to talk about things I’ve read!
1 This is me being facetious. I’ve never before read a standalone graphic novel (that I can think of at the moment) but I do read a buttload of comics.
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… he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath. |
The Round House was seriously, unbelievably good and I might have a couple things to say about it! Spoilers! » more: the round house by louise erdrich
 Live Through this was released on April 12, 1994. I was nine years old and just about to finish out third grade at a new school. I was tall for my age, fat, smart, and already just a little bit angry at the world around me. I’d started my school year at a brand new school and my big sister had just moved out of our house. I was just starting to become someone and music was the thing — the thing I loved first, the thing I loved before books or movies or television — that was helping to make that person.
Nineteen years later, I am twenty-eight years old and just about to finish up my first year in a new state. I’m no longer tall for my age, but I am still fat and smart(ish). Music is still the first thing I ever really loved, but I’m in a serious relationship with television at the moment. My idea of what “someone” is has changed dramatically and I’m okay with how I turned out most days.
Nine years old seems insanely young to me now, impossibly young — too young for Hole probably, too young for anything, honestly. But I grew up with wonderful, involved but permissive parents and KROQ and the Los Angeles alt-radio culture of the mid-90s, so young or not, I first found my footing as a human being in Green Day and Candlebox and Nirvana and Tori Amos and The Offspring and Alanis Morrissette and Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. And Hole.
 I remember standing in my bedroom screaming into the handle of a sponge mop to every single song on Live Through This. I remember scrawling lyrics out on binder covers and backpacks. I remember listening to it in the dark with my best friend Marian. I remember burning candles and shadowing my eyes with black eyeshadow and slicking my mouth with red Wet & Wild lipstick and screaming those songs like the words were being exorcised from me, like I’d die if I left them in for too long. I remember staring at that album cover, at young and barefoot and probably-not-all-that-far-from-my-age-at-the-time and still kind of unbelievably cool Courtney Love on the back. I remember the cracks in the plastic CD case.
I remember being angry — so angry — at so much, at everything. Angry at nine and at twelve and at fifteen and at twenty. Angry at myself for being fat and weird. Angry at the kids who were mean to me and at myself for being impossibly meaner back. Angry at the people who didn’t listen when I was hurting, angry at myself for getting hurt, for letting other people hurt me. Angry at the world in the most uncomplicated ways, the most individual. I was angry because I was hurt.
 I remember.
I couldn’t have told you in 1994 when I bought it on cassette at Tower Records at the West Covina Plaza or a couple years later when I bought it on CD at the same Tower Records or a year after that when I had to rebuy it because I’d worn my first copy out or when I rebought it digitally because I couldn’t take the skips from my ripped copy any longer — I’d have probably just said I liked it a lot because Green Day was my favorite band and I would’ve felt like a traitor — but Live Through This was the most important album of my youth. And nineteen years later it means more to me than ever.
I didn’t call myself a feminist in 1994, partially because I was nine years old and I didn’t really know what that meant and partially because I was raised by a father who called feminists “feminazis” and if there was one thing I wouldn’t have wanted to do in 1994, it was disappoint my father. I didn’t call myself a feminist in 2004 either because I was raised by a culture that taught me that feminism meant female superiority and that I should strive for something my conservative poli-sci professor called “equalism” but was actually code for the patriarchal bullshit status quo. I call myself a feminist now and I try very hard to be a good one, an intersectional one, an engaged one.
But I’m also angry. Still angry, so angry. And where my anger was indistinct and personal when I was young, anger built on hurt and sadness, it is anger directed at the system now, at patriarchy and rape culture and misogyny. At the incredible violence women face, institutional and political and personal.
Before I really knew why I was angry, Hole gave me a voice for it. Before I understood what it meant when a boy with a blond bowl cut chased me and my best friend around the playground at my first elementary school and flipped our skirts up, laughing, I was angry. Before I understood why a yard aid pulled me aside and told me not to play on the monkey bars because my shirt was “too short” and everyone was looking, I was angry. Before I saw the aggressive challenges from boys in high school because “girls don’t like metal” as acts of sexism, I was angry. And even though I didn’t really know it, Courtney Love was shaping that anger, asking questions that I wouldn’t understand for years, and planting the furious seeds of something that would shape me monumentally as an adult.
As an adult, that anger raged, rages through me every day. Every time I see another woman sliced open on a television or movie screen. Every time I’ve been groped or catcalled or hit on through the open windows of my vehicle. Every story I hear about street harrassment. Every time a politician thinks they have a right to make rules about what people can or cannot do with their uteruses. Every single time I’ve heard “Nice tits” or “That mouth would look great around my dick” or “You’re fat but I’d still fuck you.” Every story about assault or rape or abuse.
 Every time I remember the world I live in as a woman, the world the women I love have to live in, the world every woman has to live in, I’m angry. So angry. And at nine, at twelve, at fifteen, and nineteen, and twenty-two, and twenty-eight, I was angry and, even when I didn’t understand the forces behind the objects of my fury, Hole was there to give that fury voice and shape and color and direction. Courtney Love was there. Nineteen years later, she is no longer the sole voice of my anger, but she’s still there, familiar, always and eternal, and for that I will be forever grateful.
March was a success for the Casual-Ass Internet Book Club! In that I read and posted about it! Every month I manage to do this feels like a super big accomplishment and this month I managed to do it kind of early, so I basically feel like I just won some sort of gold-plated award.
I read more books in March than I’ve been averaging and I kept finding myself thinking, “Oh, hooray, more stories about white people.” in a particularly bored voice. And I was really irritated about it and I pledged on Twitter to do better in both my reading and my writing. So I started reconfiguring a couple of things in my first novel and I sat down and actively added books by people of color to my Amazon wishlist and decided that I would make sure to choose a book from an author of color for April. And so I did!
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From Amazon: One of the most revered novelists of our time—a brilliant chronicler of Native-American life—Louise Erdrich returns to the territory of her bestselling, Pulitzer Prize finalist The Plague of Doves with The Round House, transporting readers to the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. It is an exquisitely told story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who seeks justice and understanding in the wake of a terrible crime that upends and forever transforms his family.Riveting and suspenseful, arguably the most accessible novel to date from the creator of Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and The Bingo Palace, Erdrich’s The Round House is a page-turning masterpiece of literary fiction—at once a powerful coming-of-age story, a mystery, and a tender, moving novel of family, history, and culture. |
So here’s the plan as always!
1. Read the book!
2. Post about it on the internet no later than April 30th
3. Link me to your post in the comments here
4. I’ll do a round-up post on May 1st-ish
5. We can have a casual-ass comment party about the book
6. I’ll announce the next book
7. REPEAT
Your site, Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, even Twitter is fine! (Just Storify and link!) Whatever works for you!
This is a very casual, kick-back, low-expectations, low-effort deal! I just like the idea of reading the same book and then hearing what people think about it. That’s literally it. FUN, YES?! Good.
If you have suggestions for the next book, please please please comment with them and tell me! I’d appreciate if it was available on Kindle, but that’s the only requirement.
Share this with people if you do it! Tell me if you’re going to do it! Tell everyone!
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