More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Everything in the world would subsequently fall into two categories: The things my mother wanted me to eat Random shit I would shove into my mouth with frenzied abandon The Venn diagram of these two items would rarely, if ever, overlap.
This was where I fought with the fervor of a tiny Valkyrie with freshly butchered bangs.
I was a nightmarish combination of an iron will and a complete disinterest in my own survival.
“I think you were just trying to experience the world by tasting it,” my mother told me once. Which is a rather beautiful retelling of history.
The doubts and castigations roared in the background while I was simply trying to go about my life, eating lunch, having sex, buying jeans.
I was reaching out and tasting the world and still demanding to be loved.
With every bite you are laughing at mortality itself. To eat it is to believe, for a moment, that you will live forever.
We keep driving, this irreconcilable difference washing over us: He knows with all the fiber of his being that Red Lobster is a terrible restaurant. And I know with every fiber of my being that he is wrong.
It became a kind of normal, the way most fucked-up things do when you’re a kid.
When you’re a kid, you want the adults in your life to love you and one another. When that seems impossible, you settle for the next-best thing: Cheddar Bay Biscuits.
In the tiny kitchen of my studio, I learned to make Red Lobster’s Cheddar Bay Biscuits. They are easy to pull together—a basic buttermilk biscuit, with some added garlic powder and cheddar cheese. Making them in my home felt like a power I shouldn’t have had, a sort of magic too potent for mere mortals to wield. To have Red Lobster biscuits anytime you wanted—this was why the gods punished Prometheus.
At this time in my life, it does not yet occur to me that the things I have always longed for are things I can make myself. That if I want cheesy garlic biscuits, I can bake them. That if I wish to have a loving family, I can create one. I still believe that these things are preordained and inaccessible to me,
I still somehow think that if someone treats you badly, even if you are a child, it is because you deserve it.
cannot see myself clearly, the way none of us can when we are twenty-one and sad and think that maybe no one should love us at all. It is like looking at a painting too close up.
I have come back because this is where I once dreamed of the life I wanted to have, one meal at a time.
It’s a bittersweet thing, to look back at your childhood dreams and know that you’ve exceeded them, that you were so desperately longing for not that much.
“There is no way that is possible,” they would gasp, clutching their pearls and their monocles and their tiny dogs, and whatever fancy things people who don’t watch a lot of television clutch.
It’s a hard thing to learn: that we can ask things of other people, that we can order food how we want it.
I reminded myself that we can ask this of the world and of ourselves. To be fed, and to be loved, and not made to feel unhinged or overly emotional. This request is not too grand.
That’s the thing about voicing your needs: The world tells you how bad you’ll look if you do it. But no one tells you how great you’ll feel.
This is what Rand and I were doing in each little kitchen we shared: becoming family to each other.
I once naïvely thought feminism would be a cheat code to make the right decisions. But sometimes it’s just there to make me feel like a hypocrite for not being able to escape my old patterns of thinking, my ingrained habits, the memory of all the shitty, misogynistic things I’ve done.
When Thelma and Louise came out in 1991, there was a moral panic that feminists were going to go on murderous crime sprees. It was years before I would learn that feminists simply wanted what everyone wanted: to be loved and respected, to spend some quality time with their best friend, and to maybe fuck Brad Pitt in his prime.
Initially, I perceived it as a failure on my part, evidence that I was a very bad wife, and bad friend, and maybe just a bad person who should flee society and go live in a swamp.
Mindsets, like tectonic plates, take a long time to shift.
I’ve accepted the feminist notion that women can do anything, but the idea that we don’t have to do certain things is taking a bit longer to sink in.
It was not quite what I wanted, but it was good enough. As Dad would say, it was fine. Sometimes you have to be satisfied with that.
yet the indisputable fact is this: People are a lot kinder about me not having children when they think it wasn’t something I chose.
There was a problem, of course: I had no idea where to begin. I assumed it was innate, like motherhood itself. You were creating, after all. Not life, but a dessert, which, honestly, was close enough. How could you need instructions for something like that?
I think a prerequisite to being a parent is that you should want to be one.
Parenthood should always be a choice.
Having seen the results of previous baking endeavors, my family strongly discouraged this pursuit. For years, they tried to steer me in other directions, ones that didn’t require them to eat my creativity.
It’s a deeply condescending thing, to be told that you don’t know yourself.
Perhaps it’s that we refuse to attribute genius to women, even when it is so clearly deserved. Or perhaps it’s that we find comfort in the idea that even our mistakes might yield something good.
I remember being at a Greek café that I loved with a young man whom I was entirely indifferent to.
The waiter hands us our menus and I immediately scan mine looking for prices, because I cannot separate the excitement a meal brings me from what I’m paying for it. The two are inexorably tied.
“The women’s menus don’t have prices,” he explains. “Because women don’t want to think about money.”
“This is so unsettling,” Rand says, staring at the priceless menu. I pat his knee sympathetically. “Try not thinking about money,” I say.
Challenging the existing rules makes you less of a woman.
To eat next to someone of another race—using the same utensils—is deeply egalitarian, a figurative, if not literal, breaking of bread. It’s by design that so many of the most significant and enduring images from the Civil Rights Movement occurred at lunch counters.
Desegregated dining rooms were a direct threat to those trying to uphold the vestiges of slavery and white supremacy.
(While white women had fewer rights than their white male counterparts, many were—and are—invested in preserving the existing racist hierarchy. Doing so kept them on a higher rung than most everyone else and meant that their spouses remained in unchecked positions of power. Even those who embraced feminism often failed to do so intersectionally, and were unwilling to acknowledge their inherent white privilege.)
I should consider myself immensely lucky. And I do. But this particular kind of culinary chivalry has an ugly history. It carries with it an idea that this place I am occupying is one where I am a transgressor. I am here only by the largesse and permissiveness of white men. If I, with all my layers of privilege, feel unwelcome, what does that mean for everyone else?
Maybe it’s more that people don’t want women thinking about money, because if we do, we might start burning shit to the ground, and nothing kills the fine dining atmosphere like a gallon of gasoline, a match, and a feminist agenda.
That’s how she says it: “My house burned down.” She uses the passive voice, as though it happened on its own. Which is a little like Brutus saying, “When Caesar was stabbed in the back.” Like a baleen whale saying, “When all those plankton were eaten.” Like eighteenth-century Parisian revolutionaries saying, “When the Bastille was stormed.” Technically accurate, but we need to assign credit where it is due.
it occurred to me I hadn’t checked my phone the entire time, the sign of someone happily distracted by friends.
Even if someone wins the lottery or has a baby, they are not going to call you twenty-seven times to let you know. People only try to get ahold of you that desperately if the news is extremely bad and they want company.
I felt that weird variety of retroactive guilt that comes from knowing you were enjoying your life while, unbeknownst to you, awful things were simultaneously happening.
Sometimes everything is so overwhelming that you want to shake the heck out of that Etch A Sketch to clear it.
Nero played the fiddle while Rome burned. My mother was discussing trees.
