Yaaresse
asked
David Leite:
Obviously writing a cookbook and writing a memoir are very different undertakings on many levels, but is there any difference between them--either in the process or the mindset needed-- that took you by surprise?
David Leite
Yaaresse, I wasn't prepared for the emotional onslaught the material brought up for me. I thought I had long ago dealt with this mishegas in therapy. How naive! It caught me off-guard, and I needed to find ways to allow myself to steep in it for the writing of the book, but at the same time not allow myself to be dragged under. I wasn't always successful.
In writing a cookbook, I needed to think logically, precisely. It was a lot about measures, and weights, and clarity. And there was as much memory work as there was time spent facing the stove. But in the end, while I had some emotional epiphanies while writing the cookbook, it's still a how-to book, a book that is of service to the reader. It tells its story through the foods I featured. The memoir, on the other hand, was all memory work; my job was to get lost in memory in order to tell the story.
And that is the biggest difference between the two books. How to tell the story. The hardest part of writing the memoir was picking and choosing those scenes that together tell the story. There was a lot of arranging and rearranging of those scenes, writing and rewriting, adding and subtracting. Many times whole chapters were cut in order to serve the larger story. (The largest cut was more than 15,000 words.) I didn't know what to include until I found out what not to include.
In writing a cookbook, I needed to think logically, precisely. It was a lot about measures, and weights, and clarity. And there was as much memory work as there was time spent facing the stove. But in the end, while I had some emotional epiphanies while writing the cookbook, it's still a how-to book, a book that is of service to the reader. It tells its story through the foods I featured. The memoir, on the other hand, was all memory work; my job was to get lost in memory in order to tell the story.
And that is the biggest difference between the two books. How to tell the story. The hardest part of writing the memoir was picking and choosing those scenes that together tell the story. There was a lot of arranging and rearranging of those scenes, writing and rewriting, adding and subtracting. Many times whole chapters were cut in order to serve the larger story. (The largest cut was more than 15,000 words.) I didn't know what to include until I found out what not to include.
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