Raising Another Glass...
M.F.K. Fisher wrote, in The Art of Eating (a compendium of five of her books):
“So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.”
I like to believe that my own food writing was about more than just food. I also like to think that, just because it was written in a humorous style, doesn’t mean that it was entirely frivolous—but there’s a good chance that I have been deluding myself.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from talking to (and reading the work of) other writers, it’s this: we spend an inordinate amount of time being plagued by self-doubt. And wondering if we will ever have an idea for another book after we finish the current project. It’s a form of existential angst, in which one’s very existence (at least as a writer) is infected by uncertainty.
I recently had the chance to read an advance copy of Natalie MacLean’s next book (Wine Witch on Fire: Rising from the Ashes of Divorce, Defamation, and Drinking Too Much). It will be released in May—a most appropriate time, in which the miracle of Spring will wash away the shivery doubts of Winter.
Natalie is a well-respected, and best-selling, author of books about wine—but, like MFK Fisher’s writing, this book is not really about wine. Certainly, readers will spot wine (usually pinot noir) stains on most of the pages, but the book is really about her dealing with self-doubt—albeit self-doubt caused by a ghastly combination of external and internal forces, real and imaginary. However, her tale is neither mawkish nor depressing. In fact, there were many places where I literally laughed out loud—and not just in the internet’s LOL sense.
“Do you have to be serious to be professional? Must levity be the opposite of gravitas when the two make a more complex blend? Science has shown that the moment after we laugh, our attention to a message is highest.”
She can turn a phrase with the best of them. That’s a lot more than we can say about many of the wine writers who were the antagonists to her protagonist. While struggling against the stresses those antagonists-in-the-trade had given her, she asked a friend about how telling her side of the story would be perceived.
“It’s not slanderous to tell your friends what happened.”
“What about writing a book?” I was joking.
“You can do that as long as it’s your opinion about what happened. Tell your story from your perspective. It’s also not slander or libel when something is true.”
Whatever doubts might have cursed her back then—when the events of the book still held her in their evil spell—the writing, itself, helped her find a way to exorcise them. This book proves that she did have another book in her—and not just another good book about wine, but a good book.
Period.
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