Yesterday I thought I'd give myself a treat and read a book that had absolutely nothing to do with learning disabilities, behavior management or FAS/E, my usual favorite subjects. I'd been saving up Comfort Me With Apples, the second memoir by food writer Ruth Reichl, for just such an occasion. Her first reminiscence, Tender at the Bone, which covered her unpredictable childhood with a manic-depressive mother, her beginnings as a chef and a writer, and her marriage to her first husband, had been tasty fun. And now, with IEPs looming over my head, I figured I could use a second helping.
And for most of the way, it was just what I needed. I followed Reichl through jobs with New West magazine and the Los Angeles Times, through affairs and a second marriage, and through many meals so elaborate and strange that I would never want to eat them myself, but certainly enjoyed reading about them. Still, once you become obsessed with certain themes, you tend to find them everywhere -- and I started losing my appetite when, toward the end, the book came to the part of her trying, unsuccessfully, to get pregnant. A little close to home there. And then she and her husband are given an opportunity to adopt a baby, to whom they instantly become attached. And then the birth mother comes back to claim her, and they must give her up. I almost stopped reading; we'd morphed from food memoir to horror story.
The only way for the book, now quite close to the finish, to end happily, I thought, is if she does manage to get pregnant, unexpectedly. I launched into the final chapter with that thought in mind, and then was horrified all over again, as she left her husband after a romantic interlude and went off for 10 days of heavy drinking in Barcelona with some of California's greatest chefs. With each bottle of wine, each cocktail, I thought: If she's not pregnant at the end, I'll be sad for her; but if she is pregnant, and she's drinking like this, I'll be scared for that baby. The book did indeed end with a positive pregnancy test, and mention of her son, 11 years old at the time the book was written. No mention of how well he came through that Barcelona trip; I'll have to wait for the next memoir to find out if it's an FAS/E book after all.
Friday, May 10, 2002
No such thing as free reading
