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A review by bgprincipessa
Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites by Kate Christensen
2.0
Oof, I was really not a fan of this memoir. I hate to say too much about why I didn't like it, because this is not just a story - these occurrences are from somebody's real life, and I don't want to delve into criticizing a person's lived experiences.
However, I will comment on the way it discusses food, since I read this for the food memoir Read Harder challenge item. In a word, it's unhealthy. Especially in reminiscences from when she was younger, Christensen talks about the relationship between food and body in a way that is extremely alarming, in a way that is akin to pro-ana websites. Food and eating are not triggering subjects for me personally, but I would be concerned about putting this book in someone's hands for who they are. There is never any real addressing of how her younger self treated food and its effect on her self-worth, and that feels irresponsible. In fact, I just barely managed to finish this book, and a lot of that was because I was hoping to see some coming-to-terms with this.
I felt a lot about this as I did about [b:Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail|12262741|Wild From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail|Cheryl Strayed|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1453189881s/12262741.jpg|17237712] and [b:Eat, Pray, Love|19501|Eat, Pray, Love|Elizabeth Gilbert|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1294023455s/19501.jpg|3352398]. The authors tend to flit from place to place and relationship to relationship without explanations of how these things happened, and it makes everything feel so unrealistic and ungrounded. Suddenly someone is spending a year as an au pair in rural France with no experience doing so (and no French), with one sentence explaining how that happened? These are not everyday experiences that can be thrown off this casually. These kinds of things really get to me in memoirs.
However, I will comment on the way it discusses food, since I read this for the food memoir Read Harder challenge item. In a word, it's unhealthy. Especially in reminiscences from when she was younger, Christensen talks about the relationship between food and body in a way that is extremely alarming, in a way that is akin to pro-ana websites. Food and eating are not triggering subjects for me personally, but I would be concerned about putting this book in someone's hands for who they are. There is never any real addressing of how her younger self treated food and its effect on her self-worth, and that feels irresponsible. In fact, I just barely managed to finish this book, and a lot of that was because I was hoping to see some coming-to-terms with this.
I felt a lot about this as I did about [b:Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail|12262741|Wild From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail|Cheryl Strayed|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1453189881s/12262741.jpg|17237712] and [b:Eat, Pray, Love|19501|Eat, Pray, Love|Elizabeth Gilbert|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1294023455s/19501.jpg|3352398]. The authors tend to flit from place to place and relationship to relationship without explanations of how these things happened, and it makes everything feel so unrealistic and ungrounded. Suddenly someone is spending a year as an au pair in rural France with no experience doing so (and no French), with one sentence explaining how that happened? These are not everyday experiences that can be thrown off this casually. These kinds of things really get to me in memoirs.