Let me preface this by saying that I'm not into cookbooks (the author is some big shot cookbook writer), but I am dealing with a mother who is someone I don't want to become. For a long time, it seemed that this was the wrong way to think. After all, family means forgiving and accepting everything because they're blood. However, after reading this book, I realized that it's okay to look at a family member and come to terms with the fact that you love them, but at the same time you want to distance yourself from them.
Reichl's book has a humorous tone as she explains how her mother literally poisoned her classmates with stale food, how her mother spent so much of her life trying to find the meaning of it, but ultimately remained unhappy. What's funny is that to Reichl and to the reader, her misery seemed of her own making. Her mother was pressured to study music and so she did. She wanted to become a doctor, but she didn't because men wouldn't appreciate a smart plain looking woman. Her entire life was bowing down to her mother's expectations and pressures and when she finally woke up it was too late to take herself out of the mentality she had been brainwashed with.
The book is only 112 pages long, but it really made me reflect about my own situation. I don't have a mother who is trying to find herself in her career. I have a mother who has no motivation for anything. Yet, like Ruth Reichl's mom, she taught me subconsciously not to be like her. She taught me don't learn how to do female things just study so you don't have to depend on a man. In contrast, her own mother had nine children and taught her that men cheat and that every woman just has to deal with it. While my mother's lessons may seem sound, they have damaged my perspective in many different ways.
One of the ways is that I am now 27 trying to learn basic things like cooking, ironing, and sewing. My mother having thought that women only need to do that for a man, forgot that women who live by themselves have to do this too. Another way is my view of men. My mother taught me to be suspicious of them and I in turn have closed off my heart to the possibility of finding a caring, responsible, and faithful man. She turned me against my father and now that I've grown up I realize that he just wasn't equipped to deal with a manic depressive. A woman who is so obsessed with being a martyr that she takes food from her family to give it to others. And most depressingly, a woman who never admits that she needs help.
Reichl observes the same in her parents. Her father is constantly supporting his wife in a desperate attempt to make her happy, but in all truth our happiness comes from within. We have to be strong enough to know that we cannot follow in the bad footsteps of our parents and that sometimes our parents show us what NOT to do instead of what to do. We also have to do what makes us happy and what is good for us even if society doesn't agree.
Reichl wrote this book because she felt she owed it to her mother to write her story. To write about the effects that our parents have on us and society at large. What does it do to a woman to live out her parent's dreams? To every day be told by your own mother that you're not pretty? To see your mother quit her job to save her husband's pride? It's enough to drive even people in this age to suicide, imagine back then!
I wrote this review because I feel thankful. Thankful that Reichl has showed me to love what I can about my mother and to learn from her how to be better and ultimately, not become her.
