Fiction Ruined My Family

Jeanne Darst recounts a life filled with wrong choices, poor decisions, and a general lack of interest from her alcoholic parents and her apathetic sisters.  As might be expected, this is not a happy story, but it has it’s occasional funny bits.  I can’t think of any at the moment, but I did smile once or twice. Fiction Ruined My Family is not really about Jeanne Darst, it’s more about her father and his quest to write the ultimate tell all book about Zelda and Scot Fitzgerald.  By the time I finished this collection of personal horror stories I found that…

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Blood, Bone, & Butter

There are times while reading Blood, Bone, & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton that I find myself smiling from the simple pleasure of her prose.  A good writer can tell you how she makes pasta.  A great writer makes you want to dust the flour off your hands once she has finished telling you how she makes pasta.  Gabrielle Hamilton is a great writer. The opening pages of Blood, Bone, & Butter paint an achingly beautiful portrait of an ideal life lived with the perfect family that you know it will go terribly wrong in short order.  And when it does go…

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Cooking Dirty-Living The Life

If you could put your feet behind your head, you’d be the perfect woman. I can. She said. Want to see? That’s my favorite bit of nonsense from the wonderfully twisted chef bio called Cooking Dirty about one man’s wasted life in food service.  Along the way he learns to cook meat, do endless bumps of coke, drink near lethal doses of alcohol, and have to prove that he is a really lousy pastry chef.  It’s the book that Anthony Bourdain would have written if he hadn’t pulled so many punches in Kitchen Confidential. Cooking Dirty makes most of Tony’s…

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