Customer Reviews

Never Eat Your Heart Out

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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

This is no more a book about food than "Madame Bovary" is a book about rat poison. Writing this beautiful is seldom what it seems at first glance. Moore is as interested in the world surrounding the dinner table as she is in the what and why of specific meals. She's aware of the cumbersome baggage folks bring with them to the table and she wants to unpack it and tell us all what's inside: pride, fear, class-consciousness, and spiritual hunger. Through Moore's elegant prose, the notion of "no free lunch" has never seemed more ominous or more hopeful.

This is the sort of book you want to curl up with in front of a fire, no one around to disturb you. The plot flows (for the most part) smoothly from one self-contained chapter to another. Moore's tantalizing descriptions of people, places, and, most importantly, foods, provide brilliant and amusing reflections on life. My only complaint is about the editing, which I found wanting in some respects. On the whole, this was one of the best and most fulfilling books I've read in a long time.

I don't know anybody who has worked so hard to make it as awriter. After we finished high school and left home, my Momleft too. She moved to Berkeley to learn to be a writer.She lived for seven years in a little rented room in a roominghouse. She sat up on a lumpy single bed and typed and typed,then at night she slept in that same bed. Editors bought herpieces for alternative newspapers but that didn't make enoughmoney to live. So she knit hats, pretty hats, while sheworked and while she interviewed people. She sold those hatsto make extra money. My Mama is my hero. If you read NEVER EAT YOUR HEART OUT, maybeyou'll see why she's my hero. There are pieces in this book thatwill make you cry, too, and then there are pieces like "TheNight They Ate Mi

You might not like Judith Moore, the character. I'm not sure I do. But when she writes about herself -- and, even more, about food and nourishment -- she achieves a level of self-reflection, of descriptive power, of *trueness*, that is remarkable. The work is a bit uneven, but the chapter "Adultery" (which is how I discovered her, when it was anthologized in the Library of America's "American Food Writing") is a tour de force. A quirky, sometimes unsettling, and yet deeply thought-provoking book. Probably the best writing on food I've ever read.

This is a buffet without uniformity--the palate gets confused. Often, in her essays, there are flashes of incredible poetic insight. Then comes a chapter (like the turkey insemination chapter) and I ask, "What is this doing here?" I was so hooked on the story of her childhood. And then bang!! She is married but we know nothing about her husband or how he came to be her husband. Pardon me for mixing several metaphors (or not), but the author has strung some very diverse beads on a food-theme string and hoped they would all tie together. Excuse me, but this work suffers from NEA grants. Does the NEA ever send out "When are you going to finish this sucker?" letters? I think she must have got one. Dear God, what a talent! This is like nothing else I have ever read. Jack should have locked Judith in a room long ago (like Collete's husband did) and said "Now, just write!" But our author suffered from motherhood and a short attention span, and it shows.

Moore tells her story her way, in her own time. I sometimes had unanswered questions, but they were answered by and by. Great read!

Bought this book after reading Fat Girl by the same author. This book is not as good in my view because it is really a loose collection of personal essays , supposedly around a food theme, but not all of them are about this theme. Some essays just don't belong. This makes me annoyed as I wonder if it's one of those things where the publisher says we need more stuff to fill up the book so they threw in random essays. Fat Girl, in contrast, is a short, sharp, focused book that gets its point across. I couldn't finish reading this one.