Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table

Rating:
Summary: better subtitle:"Adventures at the Table and in the Bedroom"
Review: Note that the title comes from the Song of Solomon, 2:5
"comfort me with apples: for I am sick with love"
That should give a hint of the flavor of what you'll be reading.

Foodies interested purely in exquisite descriptions of gustatory delights should look elsewhere. This book is mostly a belated coming-of-age story: a woman who learns the ropes in a new career, and eventually finds confidence and freedom in it. She discovers unimagined intensity in love affairs, and is swept into various types of adventures under the tutelage of male lovers and acquaintances. Her father dies, and she achieves a somewhat more mature relationship with her mother. She divorces, remarries, struggles to have children against the ticking biological clock.

In the midst of all this, a lot of luscious food does appear, of course, given her job. But the actual descriptions of all that luscious food somehow feel strangely distant from the main themes of the book, which appear to be a general celebration of feminine independence as Reichl understood it, reveling in the pleasures of life, and the importance of following one's dreams and intuition.

So in the end, "Comfort Me With Apples" is at heart just a decent memoir. That memoir happens to be set in the world of food criticism in California, so it does have a fair amount of background color from there, but deep-down it is not really about that world. If you go in expecting much more you will likely be disappointed.