Kate Christensen. (2013). Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Kate Christensen. 2013. Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Kate Christensen, Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013.

Kate Christensen. Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013.

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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Christensen, Kate
   • bioText: KATE CHRISTENSEN is the author of six previous novels, most recently The Astral. The Great Man won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award. She has published reviews and essays in numerous publications, most recently the New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, O, Elle, and Gilt Taste. She writes an occasional drinks column for The Wall Street Journal called "With a Twist." Her blog can be accessed at: http://katechristensen.wordpress.com
     
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Blue Plate Special

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From acclaimed novelist Kate Christensen, Blue Plate Special is a mouthwatering literary memoir about an unusual upbringing and the long, winding path to happiness.

“To taste fully is to live fully.” For Kate Christensen, food and eating have always been powerful connectors to self and world—“a subterranean conduit to sensuality, memory, desire.” Her appetites run deep; in her own words, she spent much of her life as “a hungry, lonely, wild animal looking for happiness and stability.” Now, having found them at last, in this passionate feast of a memoir she reflects upon her journey of innocence lost and wisdom gained, mistakes made and lessons learned, and hearts broken and mended.
   In the tradition of M. F. K. Fisher, Laurie Colwin, and Ruth Reichl, Blue Plate Special is a narrative in which food—eating it, cooking it, reflecting on it—becomes the vehicle for unpacking a life. Christensen explores her history of hunger—not just for food but for love and confidence and a sense of belonging—with a profound honesty, starting with her unorthodox childhood in 1960s Berkeley as the daughter of a mercurial legal activist who ruled the house with his fists. After a whirlwind adolescent awakening, Christensen strikes out to chart her own destiny within the literary world and the world of men, both equally alluring and dangerous. Food of all kinds, from Ho Hos to haute cuisine, remains an evocative constant throughout, not just as sustenance but as a realm of experience unto itself, always reflective of what is going on in her life. She unearths memories—sometimes joyful, sometimes painful—of the love between mother and daughter, sister and sister, and husband and wife, and of the times when the bonds of love were broken. Food sustains her as she endures the pain of these ruptures and fuels her determination not to settle for anything less than the love and contentment for which she’s always yearned.
   The physical and emotional sensuality that defines Christensen’s fiction resonates throughout the pages of Blue Plate Special. A vibrant celebration of life in all its truth and complexity, this book is about embracing the world through the transformative power of food: it’s about listening to your appetites, about having faith, and about learning what is worth holding on to and what is not.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl, Dark Places, and Sharp Objects
   • content: "I've often thought that eating, writing and living well required similar qualities: creativity, daring, the ability to savor the good stuff and learn from the bad. Blue Plate Special is the memoir of an utterly original thinker, a free-spirited gourmand, and a great American writer. It's an expert guide on inspiration, ingenuity, heartbreak, buoyancy, home, love, family, screwing up, bouncing back and perfecting the bacon-cheddar biscuit."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins
   • content: "Blue Plate Special is the evocative, irresistible tale of the life and loves of one of America's greatest writers, Kate Christensen. Her loves include: Family, friends, men, travel, literature, but perhaps most of all, food. This is a breathtaking book, sensuously written, emotionally generous, and decadent as a bowl of macaroni and cheese."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Rosie Schaap, author of Drinking With Men
   • content: "No American author writes with greater generosity of spirit or blazing descriptive power than Kate Christensen. Blue Plate Special is a marvel of a memoir--warm, wise, earthy, funny, honest, haunting, and bighearted. Christensen takes her place among the other great writers who've shown us that the best writing about food must also be about life and love and the world that grants us these gifts. If you're crazy about M.F.K Fisher and Laurie Colwin, you will be crazy for this book, too. There's not a single empty calorie here: every morsel is both delicious and nourishing."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Cathi Hanauer, author of Gone and Sweet Ruin, and editor of The Bitch in the House
   • content: "Kate Christensen's prose has always been dazzling and brilliant even as it amuses and entertains. In Blue Plate Special, she applies her formidable talent to a memoir about the role of food in her (not always easy or kosher) past and present. The result is a glorious feast of meals, prose, and life from one of our finest writers today--a banquet of a book about eating, loving, and overcoming, to be devoured as fast as one's fingers can turn the pages."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews (starred)
   • content: "A novelist's deliciously engrossing exploration of her life through the two major passions that have defined it: food and writing...A Rabelaisian celebration of appetite, complete with savory recipes, that genuinely satisfies."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Booklist
   • content: "Christensen writes with savory, home-cooked clarity as she digs deeply into the pleasures and dangers of food, charting the culinary fads of the 1960s on as well as changes to women's lives while zestfully telling intimate, harrowing, and hilarious tales of appetites corrosive and nourishing."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Salon.com
   • content: "In the end, Christensen makes no grand pronouncements, offers no advice, reveals no starry epiphany. There is, simply, life, and its small pleasures, and maybe, with time, a little bit of peacemaking with the company of memory, over plates of asparagus and steamed-and-buttered clams, small glasses of Rioja and chocolate-dipped strawberries, and out of it all a generosity of spirit..."
8. • premium: False
   • source: The Wall Street Journal
   • content: "In Blue Plate Special, Christensen has deftly tucked food into every scenario, every relationship and every crossroads. But it isn't her subject. Eating is what she was doing while she was growing up, falling in love and becoming a writer. She recounts all of this very well, creating a homey and vivid portrait of a woman who has dedicated herself to sitting in a room--sometimes of her own--and writing good books, including this one."
9. • premium: False
   • source: People Magazine
   • content: "After publishing six novels, Christensen (The Great Man) turned her literary attention to food--first in a blog and now in this poignant, delicious first memoir...A delightful book that leaves you hungering for more."
10. • premium: False
    • source: The Christian Science Monitor
    • content: "How many more food-based memoirs does the reading public really need? Novelist Kate Christensen proves that there's always room for one more, provided that it's good and this one is...There's plenty of food (and no shortage of alcohol) in these pages, counterbalanced with some really fine prose."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Los Angeles Times
    • content: "Picking up Blue
12. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      June 10, 2013
      Novelist Christensen (The Great Man) describes her 1970s upbringing in Arizona in this unpretentious memoir. The oldest daughter of a Marxist lawyer and Waldorf-educated cellist, Christensen always modeled herself after her tough, uncompromising, iconoclastic father, whose manic rages nonetheless ruptured the family, sending the Christensen, her mother, and two sisters to start life in Tempe, Ariz., where her mother took up graduate studies in psychology. The three girls flourished, immersed in the era’s consciousness-raising feminist literature and instant or experimental food, recipes for which Christensen dandles along her narrative without much ado (e.g., “farmers fritters,” “camping peas”). Her efficient, chronological chapters treat some of the details those years, such as her mother’s boyfriends and her own crushes, even the sexual predator at the Waldorf school she attended briefly in high school in Spring Valley, N.Y., but mostly the undercurrent eddies around the author’s persistent loneliness, which she indulged by solitary writing and gorging on comfort food like bread and granola. A stint in France (“flageolets en pissenlits”), followed by college in Portland at Reed, graduate school in Iowa City, and work in New York round out this frank memoir, with appropriate culinary offerings for the writer’s darker moods (“Bachelorette puttanesca”).

13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      May 15, 2013
      A novelist's deliciously engrossing exploration of her life through the two major passions that have defined it: food and writing. For Christensen (The Astral, 2011, etc.), memory and food are inextricably intertwined. Her book begins with the recollection of a violent argument between her parents over an egg-and-toast breakfast. This scene reminded her of not only the simple comforts of her mother's "blue plate special"-style meals, but also of the troubled dynamic that seemed inherent in male-female relationships. Not long afterward, her mother divorced and took the author and her sisters to Arizona. In this "wild, strange place that was so profoundly different from Berkeley," Christensen suddenly became aware of "taste and texture, flavor and smell" and began reading as voraciously as she ate. Later, drinking became another source of comfort. In between attending classes at a New York arts high school, Christensen overate, crash dieted, and then wrote about her hunger and her loneliness. She refined both her palate and her cooking abilities during a year spent in France. But it would be comfort food and hard liquor that would comprise many of her meals during the vagabond life she led afterward, first at Reed College and then at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where she reignited a childhood passion for food in literature. A few alcohol-soaked, undernourished years later, she met her first husband, who "taught [her] how to enjoy food without guilt or remorse or puritanism," but with whom she fought constantly. Middle aged and unwilling to try out the "strange new world of hookups and sexting," she found unexpected love with a man 20 years her junior who fed her soul with the peace she had craved all along. A Rabelaisian celebration of appetite, complete with savory recipes, that genuinely satisfies.

      COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      July 1, 2013
      Novelist Christensen (The Astral, 2011) pegs her tangy memoir of a peripatetic life to the endless quest for sustenance and the nurturing of the self. In her first food memory, she's just eaten her favorite breakfast, soft-boiled eggs, when her father viciously attacks her mother. An anxious and overly responsible child, she vows to help her mother and relies on books for solace and enlightenment. I began with eating and moved on to cooking just as I began with reading and moved on to writing. Christensen tracks her food and literary adventures from California to Arizona, France, upstate New York, Oregon, Iowa, New York City, and New England, through tumultuous relationships and jobs as varied as short-order cook and corporate secretary. Harmonizing with her nostalgia for childhood comfort food, or blue plate specials, Christensen writes with savory, home-cooked clarity as she digs deeply into the pleasures and dangers of food, charting the culinary fads of the 1960s on as well as changes to women's lives while zestfully telling intimate, harrowing, and hilarious tales of appetites corrosive and nourishing. Recipes included.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      February 15, 2013
      

      PEN/Faulkner Award winner Christensen doesn't just write fiction (e.g., The Great Man); she writes about food on her eponymous blog. In this memoir, an in-house favorite, she talks about food to relate, more broadly, her off-kilter upbringing and current, reportedly happy life. Pitched to fans of Ruth Reichl and Gabrielle Hamilton's Blood, Bones, and Butter.

      Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      October 15, 2013
      Christensen's ("The Great Man") latest is quite a departure from her typical fiction works. In this memoir, the author unflinchingly shares her far-from-idyllic life, from growing up with an abusive father to her lifelong desire to satisfy her appetites for love and belonging. Christensen ties the events of her life story together using food; whether expressing joy, grief, loss, or love, there is a cuisine to go with it. Prolific narrator Tavia Gilbert's expert performance makes listeners feel they are catching up with an old friend. VERDICT Fans of food memoirs, such as Gabrielle Hamilton's "Blood, Bones & Butter" or Ruth Reichl's "Tender at the Bone", will be delighted. [See a Q&A with the author and the narrator on page 60.]--Donna Bachowski, Orange Cty. Lib. Syst., Orlando, FL

      Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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From acclaimed novelist Kate Christensen, Blue Plate Special is a mouthwatering literary memoir about an unusual upbringing and the long, winding path to happiness.

“To taste fully is to live fully.” For Kate Christensen, food and eating have always been powerful connectors to self and world—“a subterranean conduit to sensuality, memory, desire.” Her appetites run deep; in her own words, she spent much of her life as “a hungry, lonely, wild animal looking for happiness and stability.” Now, having found them at last, in this passionate feast of a memoir she reflects upon her journey of innocence lost and wisdom gained, mistakes made and lessons learned, and hearts broken and mended.
   In the tradition of M. F. K. Fisher, Laurie Colwin, and Ruth Reichl, Blue Plate Special is a narrative in which food—eating it, cooking it, reflecting on it—becomes the vehicle for...

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