If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

by Geraldine DeRuiter

We’d gotten used to the flames. We just took for granted that they would remain figurative.

For my mother, neither food nor people are past redemption.

Her cooking became a too obvious allegory for her approach to life.

I couldn’t help her in the kitchen any more than I could in anything else. She’d warn me that I would get burned, as though it were an inevitability, and so I would stand in the doorway, watching her as if she were a trapeze artist without a net.

Being a reaction to someone doesn’t mean that you are free from them.

There are days when I wish she’d loved us better, and then I realize that what I really want—what I’ve always wanted—was for her to have loved herself a little bit better.

Humanity had mastered fire, which was ostensibly a good thing, but what made us think we should bring it inside our very flammable homes with our very flammable families? How was this anything but sheer hubris?

Obviously, I started a blog. I had so much wisdom to share.

The Everywhereist has ebbed and flowed since I started it in 2009, a reflection of my own difficulties writing consistently, my doubts about my career, my inability to focus, something akin to writer’s block but less romantic that I attribute to laziness. Some years I’ve written 250 posts. Some years I’ve written roughly ten. I have wondered if I should abandon it altogether. Sometimes I do, for months at a time. But I always come back.

I’d hit a personal and professional malaise that involved wearing a lot of...

I considered pitching my essay idea to some food magazines, but I’d always felt like an outsider in that world....

We blame ourselves. We hate ourselves. We wonder if our skirts are too short, if our bodies are too noticeable. If we’re asking for too much, or not enough. We don’t trust ourselves, even when we should.

Virality is an impossible thing to predict, and an even harder thing to describe.

Because what we did on the internet did count. They just didn’t want it to count for them.

Sometimes, even I fell into the trap of this thinking. I wondered if I’d brought all of this upon myself. During the worst of it, I wondered if perhaps I shouldn’t have written the blog post at all.

It is hard to classify exactly what Twitter meant if you’re a writer. It was simultaneously the worst and the best place in the world.

The moral: Sprinkles are a necessity at the end of the world.

I was ignoring the first precious word in the phrase “comfort food”—that in order to comfort, the grief and pain have already arrived.

This was what was at risk when toxic chefs were elevated—not merely that they succeeded, but that people like Jessie weren’t seen. That, more than anything else, was the true crime of it.

“Just keep writing,” he tells me, every time I ask him what I’m doing with my life, which is on a near-daily basis. “Good things happen when you write.” But I have yet to see any evidence of this. I vacillate between thinking I’m an absolute genius and a worthless pile of trash; between being hell-bent on making it and knowing that I will fail, utterly. It is self-indulgent and torturous. In the years to come, it will hit me: This is just what it means to be an artist.

I don’t want to fictionalize my stories. The whole point is that they’re ridiculous and true.

And the problem with characters in novels is that they have more responsibility than ordinary messy actual people do to make sense.

we don’t get the intimate view of her life without knowing what was really going on. She shows us the truth behind the lovely steaks we see in the counter, and the truth behind the story of her life everyone glommed on to. It feels unfair to turn away in disgust at it.

But I’m able to be this sanctimonious only because she’s so open with her flaws.

This is what happens when you write about your life, the inevitable side effect of being a memoirist. I had been on the other side of it. Strangers expressing disapproval online of my opinions, of my language, of any time my views or values differed from theirs.

I remember in the early days of my site just how grueling it was, how I so desperately wanted to be liked. I am graciously learning to give fewer fucks as I’ve gotten older, but there have been years and years of my second-guessing myself and having a crisis whenever a negative comment did come through.

Now, at the ripe old age of “everything hurts, all the time, because I tried to put on a sock,” I have learned that the only constant in life is the impermanence of everything.

was wrong for disliking it, as though they were more reliable narrators than I was for my own lived experiences.

I’m tired of feeling that way. I like who I am. I like eating. I like the creativity that emerges when I allow myself to feel my anger. It makes my writing better.

As a writer, it’s a maddening thing—that I have no idea how or when my story ends.

I assume that this pie is just a way of reliving his own memories. I don’t see his answer for what it is: a way of sharing those memories with us.

That maybe a recipe is a way of keeping the people you love alive forever.

But it is a small sacrifice to make, a relatively insignificant piece of time and energy in exchange for the enduring memory of a dish.