What's Eating Her? A Writer Meditates On Food And Loneliness
But it's actually not the eating that most interests Christensen, and she's really no good at the self-mythologizing at which so many food writers excel. Instead, she has written a memoir that while tracking her relationship to food and describing some incredibly satisfying meals she has had, is really more concerned with the heartbreak and loneliness that shape an individual creative life.
She's a classic child of the 1960s and '70s, complete with parents who are alternately absent and overbearing, and a surrounding culture that treats children as an afterthought. She had a distant, narcissistic hippie dad who shattered her and her two sisters' bohemian Berkeley upbringing by turning his violent temper on their mother, who responded by taking her girls to Arizona to enroll in a Ph.D. program in psychology. Christensen establishes a pattern of wanting to outtough her father while discovering that she craves feminine retreat from the world. The blue-plate specials of the title were her mother's nickname for the relatively wholesome, unadorned meals the family enjoyed in Arizona. Later Christensen becomes no stranger to French cuisine (albeit of less than four-star caliber), thanks to a pre-college stint in France made possible by her family's involvement with the international Rudolph Steiner movement.
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