On Memories As Fragments

So far, the work of writing a food memoir is in the remembering.

“Memories are like flies swarming through the air, jumbled-up bits of memory,” Agnès Varda says in The Beaches of Agnès. “The vignette disrupts the notion of life as a narrative arc,” writes Dodie Bellamy in “Unbearable Intimacies.”

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I feel more honest when I tell you stories in bits and pieces. Memory is a broken thing, and I am not very good at forcing it into order and narrative. I am not good at lying, is what it is, and storytelling—even the telling of true stories—demands some smoothing-out, some glossing-over in order to make the narrative. I am writing a food memoir and so I am reading all the food memoirs on my shelves. Nigel Slater’s Toast: The Story of Boy’s Hunger is written in a way that makes sense to me, little vignettes that build up and add up. Life is like that, and how we remember life even more so. I’ve been afraid of memoir because I worry about what I can’t remember. Luckily, I have made it so I fill in my gaps with stories of the soil, of culture, of others’ work.

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As a child, I was obsessed with conducting a thought experiment in which I imagined having been born somewhere else. I shuddered at the thought that there were other dimensions where I wouldn’t have been born where I was, on Long Island: What’s a person like who doesn’t grow up in or near New York City? I wondered. I didn’t know anyone like that yet; I wouldn’t for a while. The city’s proximity, our relationship to that proximity, defined me and everyone around me.

The thought experiment extended to other nations, what it would be like to live in them. The more obscure, the more compelling the imaginative possibilities: I had begged for and received a globe that I would spin and study, preparing for the day that I would appear on Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? It never came, but still I always daydreamed about the Alicia who wasn’t from Long Island, the Alicia I could never be, and what her days would look like. Would she have a globe? Would she have been as obsessed with the notion of elsewhere and all its possibilities, its potential stories, its shifted perspectives?

U.S. schooling teaches us our nation’s great exceptionalism; U.S. media shows the rest of the world as a starving, war-torn place—or at least it did when I was a kid. To grow up is to either learn that the U.S. is often the one creating or enabling the conditions of starvation and war, or to burrow ever more deeply into the exceptionalism fantasy. How are the people doing who bought in now, when we see the forced famine of Palestinians in Gaza by Israel? When we see Palestinians shot attempting to get flour? Do they believe that our enabling of this as a nation is justified? Do they ever look at a map and wonder what their life would be like had they been born somewhere else, how the U.S. would look to them? Would it look infantile, insipid, macho—with all its violence and superhero movies? This is the kind of soil that fills in my memory lapses.

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I worry about what I can’t remember because I know I’ve forgotten in order to protect something or someone. Probably just myself. How could I have been sleepwalking through all these years, my memories fluttering back into view like dreams and nothing more? I was taking notes the whole time. The memories that are clearest in my mind are the ones that I’ve replayed, over and over, and the ones that have only recently emerged, inspired by the fact of making a new family of two. I think of my parents at either end of the dinner table but really, I think about glances toward my brother in which we wordlessly assessed their level of unhappiness with each other and how that might affect the rest of our evening. I imagine us at the dinner table and see us growing in a time-lapse, and then bam: Our sister, in her high chair. 

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My mom says my memory of when they told us she was having another baby is wrong. I remember it as having happened in the car on the way home from Costco. I’ve had to take off my headphones and hit “pause” on The Verve’s Urban Hymns to hear what she has to say, and my brother and I slump into the backseat when we’re told a sibling is coming. My mom says we were at dinner, that she wouldn’t just announce something like that in the car. What did she announce that made us slump in the backseat and why am I compressing the two memories?

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The Costco parking lot as the site of a momentous family occasion tracks, though. I think of Costco as a purely happy place, a place of order and sensibility and—funny enough, given how I’ve ended up as a vegetarian—rolls of prosciutto and mozzarella. When my sister was old enough, we’d get very berry fro-yo swirls in plastic pint cups. I needed my own; a constant in my memories is an unwillingness to share, a disappointment with a meager serving. (“I have nothing to declare but my greed,” writes Nigella Lawson in How to Eat.) With my sister old enough, now we start with samples of whatever liquor they’re giving away in the attached store. 

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I used to come home from school in the afternoons ravenous and the best thing to find in the fridge was cold Chinese food. The one year when I ran winter track, though, I would come home on the late bus and down nearly an entire pint of ice cream. When I only pretended I was running winter track to fulfill my father’s athletic ambitions for me, I wouldn’t be so desperate; that’s how my mom knew I was spending my after-school hours hanging out in the cafeteria eating Snickers bars.

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My feelings on grocery shopping have evolved throughout the years, and when my mom was trying to keep my 38th birthday party a surprise from me (at my husband’s behest, because he has a grand attachment to surprises), she came back home with a bag from Meat Farms. “You went to Meat Farms without me?” I said to her, my feelings deeply hurt like they never would have been if she’d gone to Pathmark without me when I was 15. But maybe she’ll tell me I’m remembering that wrong, too.

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A lot of my adolescent memories about food revolve around my being lactose intolerant and desperate to find a bathroom, which is why my young adult memories about food revolve around being vegan.

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What’s proving strangest is having to get into fucked-up shit I put away in a box—shit I processed and took the positive away from and don’t think about in order not to live a daily life filled with questions, regret, rage. I’ve got to open the box.

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There are things I’m happy to eat and drink to reignite my memories, such as a wide selection of apples. There are things I’m neutral about eating and drinking again, such as Cavendish bananas out of season and locality. There are things I won’t eat, like lamb chops. There are things I’m afraid of, like Dr Pepper, my high school beverage of choice. The last time I tried to throw caution to the wind and ordered a Cherry Coke, one weekday afternoon in 2018 at the IFC Center while going to see Shoplifters, I ended up with my stomach in knots. I’ll stick to gin, which only does me dirty if I let it.

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Attempting to remember my life is a study of embarrassment and shame. I have to go back to all the notebooks, even the purple crushed velvet one from middle school and the green suede one from high school; I have to look for clues in the sad poetry and ever-shifting resentments. When I got into food, I became “compulsively creative,” a friend told me at the time (or, ok, my then-boyfriend, as he changed the CD in his Scion tC—his tone wasn’t altogether positive; neither of us were the people the other wanted us to be); I’d always been looking for that thing that would do it, that would give structure to all the sad poetry and attention paid. There are so many memories, after all. Now I’m gathering the bits; now I’m putting together the pieces.

Paid Subscriber Notes

This Friday, I will send out From the Desk Recommends… a roundup of essays, podcasts, and more that have entertained me in the last month—plus a book giveaway and a playlist. Free subscribers will receive the introductory essay, which is my short, loose monthly essay on matters of the day.

Over the weekend, I added a vegan mofongo to The Desk Cookbook.

For March and April, The Desk Book Club is reading Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal by Hanna Garth. Buy it from Archestratus for 20 percent off!

Olive oils from The Olive Odyssey.

News

For Roadmap, I wrote a piece on social media performances of domestic labor, the ways in which women consistently try to make meaning of the Sisyphean work, and how I personally was struggling with obsession about cleanliness at the end of last year (a symptom of burnout but also working at home makes it hard!).

Reading

I’m digging back into Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds by Yemisi Aribisala to both study the food memoir form and get ahead on the May-June Desk Book Club pick. I’m listening to Leslie Jamison’s Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story as an audiobook—my first.

A Lifestyle Note

Get yourself some nice olive oil. This stuff is truly gorgeous.