Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir

by Ruth Reichl

Truman’s words stayed with me the entire time I was at Gourmet, but as the years went on I began to see them very differently. At first I thought of them in a wistful way, hating myself for not being more Truman-like. But I just didn’t have it in me. Was it because I’m a woman, trained to be a good girl and play by the rules? Truman had related that tale with a kind of glee. Why wouldn’t he? He’d figured out how to manipulate the system. And so, although I behaved with the grudging grace of a bratty teenager, each time Gina called, I went. But in later years, when I was throwing myself wholeheartedly into the chase for advertising dollars, I wished I’d followed Truman’s example when I still had the chance. And at the end, when my primary job had become the endless quest for the money that might save the magazine, I looked back at those words with incredulity: They were proof positive of how enormously our entire world had shifted.