"And there was a silence, and my father was ashen, and there was a sort of collective in-drawing of breath from the people in the group, and I realized that was just not cool, what I had just said. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I don't even know where it came from, what caused me to blurt out, 'My father hit my mother and she cried,' to the group. "I remember looking up at the group of grownups, and feeling an upwelling of anger at my father. She even recalls the eggs she was eating that morning when she watched her father attack her mother. They're prompted, often as not, by vivid memories from her past. That unwillingness to accept her own vulnerability, however, served her poorly as she grew older, and the memoir chronicles her struggles to come to terms with her family and with others as she pursued a writing career.Ĭhristensen, the author of six novels and a food writer for the Wall Street Journal with a personal blog, weaves recipes into the memoir. It was a coping mechanism, she says, a psychological distancing tactic with which a young child protected herself. "I didn't want to be the person who got beaten up," she confesses. The book that unfolds is an examination of the reverberations of her father's violence in her life, and a meditation on how her love of food helped her cope.Īs a child, she tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies, she refused to identify with her mother in the scenario. It was a scene that would haunt Christensen for decades.Īnd so it's with a description of that morning that she chooses to begin her memoir Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites. When novelist Kate Christensen was just a toddler, she witnessed her father beating her mother. Interviews Marcus Samuelsson: On Becoming A Top Chef
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