My Kitchen Wars

A darkly comic memoir of the "kitchen wars" traces one woman's struggles in the post-war period as she wages war on the Puritanism of her upbringing and the social strictures preventing her from a host of pleasures, both carnal and professional

As befits a noted food historian and writer (I Hear America Cooking), Fussell recounts how the domestic wars of her childhood, marriage and family life played out in a succession of kitchensAin brilliant vignettes marked by appealing humor, biting irony and unflinching honesty. In the house where Fussell was born, the scene of her father's delight in squeezing oranges became, before Fussell was two, that of the death of her high-strung mother, with an open tin of rat poison mutely testifying to the cause. Until Fussell escaped to college, she endured the harsh restrictions of a hostile stepmother whose favorite appliance was the pressure cooker. At school, Fussell concentrated on the primary mission of every girl in the late 1940s: landing a man. When she married Paul, a literature student, the inevitable wedding present of that eraAa Waring blenderAsymbolized the beginning of a sophisticated lifestyle. Paul focused on his career in academe, while Betty enthusiastically embraced her role as wife and mother, and turned entertaining into a competitive sport. In the 1960s, the Fussells' circle turned to erotic excess: Betty recalls drunken wife-swapping and her own illicit affair, and she offers gossipy tidbits about Kingsley Amis and Philip Roth. Paul's book, The Great War and Modern Memory, brought him acclaim but, according to Betty, he continually demeaned her writing efforts. Their marriage failed after his homosexual affair with a student. Fussell was finally able to make her own way using what the French call a "batterie de cuisine" (kitchen artillery), displaying her considerable talents in such publications as the New York Times and nine of her own books. Agent, Gloria Loomis, Watkins Loomis Agency. First serial to the New Yorker; 8-city author tour. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A memoir by a woman who measures out her life in kitchen utensils, from her father's orange-juice squeezer to an olive wood spoon used to stir ``the stockpot of memories'' simmered here. Fussell (The Story of Corn, 1992, etc.) begins with a tour of her kitchen, noting the odd implements in what the French call the batterie de cuisine,'' including crushers, beaters, scrapers and grinders. ``Cooking is a brutal business,'' she comments, moving on to describe a childhood, if not brutal, at least marked by tragedy and hardship. When she was two, her mother died from ingesting rat poison (``the mouth is the . . . portal to the Other Side,'' notes Fussell much later). Moved from the care of loving grandparents into a new home with her father and stepmother, she spent most of the next decade sobbing, until she left for college. There she met and fell in love with then would-be writer Paul Fussell. Characterizing the beginning of her marriage as the ``Invasion of the Waring Blenders'' (they received two for wedding presents), she discovered sex and lobsters on her honeymoon and chafed at the restraints of being a post-WWII housewife while her husband studied for his Ph.D. Her own postgraduate studies were interrupted frequently as she followed her now professor-husband from university to university, bearing two children and finally settling in Princeton, N.J. There she and other faculty wives were caught in a culture of drinking, sensuous flirtations, and menus with French accents. Her affair with food lasted far longer than her affair with one of her husband's colleagues. Unable to find a job teaching, she began to write about food, at first in newspapers and then in books. Her marriage ended when she confronted her husband in bed with another man, described in a chapter titled ``Cold Cleavers.'' Carefully and skillfully written, but curiously unfulfilling, like a rich cassoulet without seasoning. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Readers who assume that cookbook author Fussell's autobiography is just another charming foodie memoir will be in for a startling surprise. In the story of Fussell's childhood and her marriage to writer Paul Fussell, the kitchen is a battlefield as often as it is a haven. Fussell's kitchen wars began as a child, when the denial of taste, of food as pleasure, was just one of the ways her puritanical stepmother inflicted her will upon Betty and her brother. Fussell escaped her stepmother when she went to college and met Paul, who introduced her to the life of the mind. Unfortunately, she quickly learned that, although her taste buds were liberated, her intellectual aspirations were to remain unfulfilled in the role of faculty wife and mother. The outlines of Fussell's story are similar to many other feminist coming-of-age memoirs, but there is a distinct and fascinating difference. Being tied to the kitchen was among the manifestations of Fussell's servitude as faculty wife, and while she resented the forced confinement, she liked the kitchen just fine: "If you could stand the heat, did you have to get out of the kitchen?" She eventually did get out of Fussell's kitchen--spurred on by both her own infidelities and his dalliances with male students--but it is food writing that finally gives her the sense of self she craved while serving canapes to the likes of R. P. Blackmur and Kingsley Amis. It is what kitchens stand for in Fussell's life--servitude and liberation, simultaneously--that gives this compelling memoir its delicious irony. The author (and chef) knows how to get the most from her ingredients, and she uses not only irony but also self-deprecating humor and poignant understatement with delicate precision. "God help me, I love it," General Patton said of war as he stood on an ancient battleground. Fussell might say the same of kitchens. Bill Ott

Fussell's riveting memoir parallels the lives of many women who fought their own private wars against a backdrop of tense world politics. Readers will empathize with her dysfunctional West Coast childhood, anticipate her liberation as she attends college during World War II, and celebrate her romantic marriage to a veteran with a promising academic career (historian Paul Fussell). Life as a young faculty wife began with earthy, pot-luck picnics and flirtation and evolved into elaborate, multicourse dinner parties, extramarital affairs, and boredom during the affluent, turbulent Sixties. Her marriage failing, Fussell embarked on her own remarkable career, becoming a food historian/writer acclaimed for her most recent work, The Story of Corn (LJ 7/92). More intense than Ruth Reichel's Tender at the Bone (LJ 3/15/98), this work features dark humor and stunning gastronomic descriptions that will speak to Fussell's contemporaries and astonish younger generations fighting different battles today. Recommended for public libraries.ABonnie Poquette, Shorewood P.L., WI
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.