Never Eat Your Heart Out [Paperback]

Judith Moore (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 27, 1998

In this tart, satisfying memoir, as keenly lyrical about its author’s life as it is down-to-earth and hilarious about American food, Judith Moore recollects the good, bad, and terrible dramas of her life and places them in memorable culinary frames.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Judith Moore dishes up more than just her life story in Never Eat Your Heart Out, a mélange of unforgettable meals and bittersweet memories. In each of the 25 chapters, food and life experiences are inextricably linked. In "Pie" a meditation on the pleasure of making mud pies conjures up a particular afternoon in the author's childhood when thunder, chicken pie, and a dead baby bird converged to form a memory that is still sharp. In "Eating Peter Rabbit" the author changes gears, embarking on a thorough discussion of the differences between rabbits and hares, the reason why the majority of Americans won't eat either ("We gag on cute."), and the history of rabbits and the culinary arts from ancient times to the present. Another chapter, "Adultery," describes Moore's extramarital affair in terms of the meals she cooked while it occurred. In Never Eat Your Heart Out, Judith Moore follows in the grand tradition of M.F.K. Fisher, one of the first to understand that writing about food is really writing about life. Like Fisher before her, Moore creates a feast with her evocative prose; mouthwatering meals; and profound conclusions about life, love, and cooking. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Recollections of food?good and bad, ranging from breakfasts and picnics to watermelon and cranberries?trigger memories that shape this untidy grab bag of autobiographical sketches. Moore's first three and a half years were full of happy times with Daddy; then comes her parents' divorce, and she's shipped off to a farm to be raised by an evil grandmother right out of the Brothers Grimm. We're not told where, except that it's in Snow Country. Adolescence is next, and an early marriage to a dreary, small-town boy only remembered for his shoe size and the daughters he fathered. Adultery follows at age 39 (with a man 15 years older, whose mouth tasted of dentures), then separation and, finally, less negative feelings about her life. Moore seems to have a knack for meeting ugly people, whom she describes almost as vividly as she describes food. There are several wonderful essays?relatively free of autobiography?that stand alone as social histories of various foods?potatoes, for instance?and rabbits. There's a darkly funny train trip from Oakland, Calif., to New Orleans that reads like a sly send-up of early Joan Didion. There are moving thoughts on the meaning of canning and applesauce-making. And there is an endless, leaden account of a church supper that begins patronizingly and goes on to include every cliche of small-town life from Winesburg, Ohio, to Peyton Place. Moore is a wonderful food writer but a labored memoirist.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: North Point Press (May 27, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865475180
• ISBN-13: 978-0865475182
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,596,099 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Odd mix of memoir and musings, June 29, 2001

By 

Carol Peterson Hennekens (Colorado Springs, CO United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Never Eat Your Heart Out (Paperback)

I read this book for my book club. As a book club book it was pretty successful. We didn't talk all that much about the book itself but the book prompting some wonderful discussion about food and memories and the like.

For the reader without a discussion to look forward to, I'd be reluctant to recommend the book. Something is missing for me about this read. I've given it three stars because the actual writing (particularly some of the food descriptions) is quite strong. But the content is lacking. I'm all for memoirs of interesting people but I really learned far more about Moore's relatively ordinary life than I ever wanted to know. Then, just to confuse things, are some pretty random essays about food totally outside of the context of the memoir. It just doesn't work for what I want out of a read in this type of a book.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sly social commentary disguised as mouth watering essays, October 27, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (Sarasota, FL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Never Eat Your Heart Out (Hardcover)

Talk about a futile admonishment! How can we help but eat our hearts out? The prose in this collection of essays is so ripe, so pure, it glistens like perfect fruit-almost too good to consume. Powerfully rendered, different essays will serve as emotional lightning rods for different readers. Documenting Judith Moore's relationship with the creative side of nourishment, these essays span nearly half a century. Beginning in the early nineteen forties, when Moore is three and has a passion for both her father and mud pies, they continue right up to recent past, when the fear she felt as the mother of a toddler who refused to eat is transformed into the gift of a story to comfort that child, now a parent herself. Without the emotional content of Moore's life, the essays that are merely about food ("Spuds" for example), seem academic and lifeless. The best of the twenty-five are stories that document change--Moore's life often serving as a baromenter of the social atmosphere in America. One or two are outright horror stories--the grandmother who pickles pigs snouts, lips and ears in Mason jars is fascinatingly repellant. Several essays are intensely lyrical as they depict new-found love and the food that is created to celebrate those feelings. (The cooking involved in "Adultery" is downright voluptuous.) Always, Moore is a reporter both passionate and logical, infusing the bittersweet passage of time with humor and forgiveness.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Life's no picnic. . .if you think about it., January 26, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Never Eat Your Heart Out (Hardcover)

On the surface, Judith Moore has lead an unremarkable life: Child of parents who, in her early chilhood, divorced; frustrated teenager; young wife and mother of two daughters in rapid succession; altar guild member wanabee; adultress; gardener; housewife; middle-aged runaway. But Ms Moore redeems the seemingly unremarkable from insignificance by way of fierce scrutiny and introspection, and a sometimes humurous, sometimes bone-chilling, sometimes heart warming and sometimes revolting truth-telling about what she finds just beneath the surface of everyday life. Reading her will cause you to take pause and, if you're lucky, perhaps even redeem your unremarkable self