Never Eat Your Heart Out

by Judith Moore

Book Overview

Proust was not the only writer to understand the deep connections between food and memory. In this remarkable book, as keenly lyrical about its author's life as it is hilarious and down-to-earth about... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374220735
• ISBN13: 9780374220730
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Great food writing

You might not like Judith Moore, the character. I'm not sure I do. But when she writes about herself -- and, even more, about food and nourishment -- she achieves a level of self-reflection, of descriptive power, of *trueness*, that is remarkable. The work is a bit uneven, but the chapter "Adultery" (which is how I discovered her, when it was anthologized in the Library of America's "American Food Writing") is a tour de force. A quirky, sometimes unsettling, and yet deeply thought-provoking book. Probably the best writing on food I've ever read.

Sly social commentary disguised as mouth watering essays

Talk about a futile admonishment! How can we help but eat our hearts out? The prose in this collection of essays is so ripe, so pure, it glistens like perfect fruit-almost too good to consume. Powerfully rendered, different essays will serve as emotional lightning rods for different readers. Documenting Judith Moore's relationship with the creative side of nourishment, these essays span nearly half a century. Beginning in the early nineteen forties, when Moore is three and has a passion for both her father and mud pies, they continue right up to recent past, when the fear she felt as the mother of a toddler who refused to eat is transformed into the gift of a story to comfort that child, now a parent herself. Without the emotional content of Moore's life, the essays that are merely about food ("Spuds" for example), seem academic and lifeless. The best of the twenty-five are stories that document change--Moore's life often serving as a baromenter of the social atmosphere in America. One or two are outright horror stories--the grandmother who pickles pigs snouts, lips and ears in Mason jars is fascinatingly repellant. Several essays are intensely lyrical as they depict new-found love and the food that is created to celebrate those feelings. (The cooking involved in "Adultery" is downright voluptuous.) Always, Moore is a reporter both passionate and logical, infusing the bittersweet passage of time with humor and forgiveness.

Clear, direct prose at its most subversive.

This is no more a book about food than "Madame Bovary" is a book about rat poison. Writing this beautiful is seldom what it seems at first glance. Moore is as interested in the world surrounding the dinner table as she is in the what and why of specific meals. She's aware of the cumbersome baggage folks bring with them to the table and she wants to unpack it and tell us all what's inside: pride, fear, class-consciousness, and spiritual hunger. Through Moore's elegant prose, the notion of "no free lunch" has never seemed more ominous or more hopeful.

Life's no picnic. . .if you think about it.

On the surface, Judith Moore has lead an unremarkable life: Child of parents who, in her early chilhood, divorced; frustrated teenager; young wife and mother of two daughters in rapid succession; altar guild member wanabee; adultress; gardener; housewife; middle-aged runaway. But Ms Moore redeems the seemingly unremarkable from insignificance by way of fierce scrutiny and introspection, and a sometimes humurous, sometimes bone-chilling, sometimes heart warming and sometimes revolting truth-telling about what she finds just beneath the surface of everyday life. Reading her will cause you to take pause and, if you're lucky, perhaps even redeem your unremarkable self

My Mama wrote this book. When I read it, I cry.

I don't know anybody who has worked so hard to make it as awriter. After we finished high school and left home, my Momleft too. She moved to Berkeley to learn to be a writer.She lived for seven years in a little rented room in a roominghouse. She sat up on a lumpy single bed and typed and typed,then at night she slept in that same bed. Editors bought herpieces for alternative newspapers but that didn't make enoughmoney to live. So she knit hats, pretty hats, while sheworked and while she interviewed people. She sold those hatsto make extra money. My Mama is my hero. If you read NEVER EAT YOUR HEART OUT, maybeyou'll see why she's my hero. There are pieces in this book thatwill make you cry, too, and then there are pieces like "TheNight They Ate Mi