A note to say thank you: On Eating is ranking at #9 on Kitchen Arts & Letters best-selling books of the year thus far, and it’s the only memoir in the top 20 and the only one in the top 10 without recipes.
The emails keep coming and I always take a deep breath before I open them. While most are quite nice, many are telling me things I don’t really need to know about my own work, things I obsess over in an unhealthy way. I’ve recently been told something I’ve heard repeatedly: A person enjoys my writing but doesn’t always agree with me (I care only, honestly, that you enjoy my writing—that’s the point of it). Another person wrote to say the topics and pursuits of my newsletter no longer match their values (what do I or should I know of a strangers’ values?).
Reasonably, I know I need to stop trying to make sense of the noise, of these odd bids for attention, and focus on the positive. Most people know, though, that focusing on the positive when the negative is right there tantalizing you is extremely difficult. The rage bait is coming from right inside my own inbox, and I have to recognize that I am more obsessed with being liked than I’ve ever actually believed about myself. I value being liked! Something Marc Maron says in this Hollywood Reporter comedian roundtable really resonated with my own shit (as he often does!): “I do want people to like me, but I seem to want to make them work for it a little bit.”
Three essay workshops in July: personal, reported, and cultural criticism. These will be presentations followed by discussions. Each has three essays to read—no food included, a mix of old and new. Choose day or evening sessions. $100 for non-members; $75 for members; $50 for Friends of the Desk; free for Tomato Tomato Patrons (the latter two, email me for your codes).
You can also book a private editorial consultation or download a workshop. The Food Essay will return in the fall.
I’ve written in the past about how much I despise a digital culture—so fractured now that you can be served on a platter only things that you agree with and that match your values—that prioritizes people’s feelings over thoughts and analysis. I don’t agree! I can’t relate! I have feelings about this! These are simply reactions, like stubbing a toe and yelling “ouch!” While I of course have plenty of involuntary reactions to things, because it’s natural, I comment on them in real life to people I know well; they’re not anyone else’s problem. If I’m going to write about them, I have to take my reactions and figure out why I’m having them.
This brings me again to the question of “values,” apparently on the tip of everyone’s tongue these days, and the way the writer Annie Lowery of the Atlantic, in her piece “THE ‘VIBECESSION’ IS OVER. THE ‘PERMACESSION’ IS HERE”—its SEO title is, hilariously, “Americans Refuse to Be Happy”—characterizes a shift in U.S. voters’ concerns. I certainly had reactions to this piece! She writes:
Seventy years ago, voters were overwhelmingly concerned with life-and-death issues: war, hunger, disease, violence. Today voters are more worried about social concerns: the environment, minority rights, immigration, health policy, casitas, I guess.
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