The Kitch Lit Series: Top Chef Adjacent

The Season 18 Top Chef premiere is only a couple days away. So it is fitting that I found myself reading a couple of books that are Top Chef adjacent.

The first, Apron Anxiety, is a chronicle of Alyssa Shelasky’s “messy affairs in and out of the kitchen.” Shelasky, a New York City-based gossip and celebrity journalist changes her life and her outlook of it when she discovers a dormant passion for cooking. Apron Anxiety spends time before, during and after her relationship with Top Chef contestant Spike Mendelsohn. Note that Mendelsohn was named only as “Chef” in the book and I used all my willpower to wait until the end to utilize the Google machine to uncover his identity. While the relationship had ups and downs, through it she found cooking and, perhaps more importantly, purpose. While reading about Shelasky’s exploits is fun, the relationship she develops with herself and those around her through food and cooking are much more meaningful.

After devouring Apron Anxiety, I jumped into Padma Lakshmi’s memoir Love, Loss, and What We Ate. I knew very little about Lakshmi before reading the book: former model, TV host, spent a stint married to Salman Rushdie. Lakshmi is, not surprisingly, a much more complex individual than those three points allow. Hers has been a life spent around the world, discovering and searching. Lakshmi’s writing style is easy and clean. At times, the book feels heavy, Lakshmi having experienced more than her share of heartache, a celebrity romp this is not.  As a Top Chef junkie, I longed for more behind the scenes detail but there’s really very little insight into the show itself, for that is not the objective of the book. Although, the snippets do make very clear that hosting Top Chef is much harder than it looks. Love, Loss, and What We Ate is the the honest retelling of how the experiences of her life have shaped her into the person she is today. 

Recipes are sprinkled throughout each book, giving us the opportunity to share some of their experiences. Apron Anxiety was published nearly ten years ago and Love, Loss, and What We Ate is now nearly five years old, leaving the reader with the distinct knowledge that there is more to the story. What happened next?

Lit Preview: The Journey, Not the Destination

Nico has a hard edge but, like so many teenagers, her edge comes from a place of unease and vulnerability. She has yet to find her place within her family or at school, let alone in the world. As a result, Nico is searching and finds solace in skipping school and reckless behavior. Nico’s universal and relatable struggle to find herself – with a hefty side of sarcasm – coupled with Lee Matthew Goldberg’s concise plotting make Runaway Train a pleasure to catch. 

As Runaway Train opens, Nico is reeling from the sudden death of her seventeen year old sister, Kristen. As you may have guessed, her death was sudden and completely unexpected. Nico and her parents, not on the best of terms before Kristen’s death, now find themselves almost entirely at odds, despite the fact that they are wading through grief together. Nico, convinced that her fate will be the same as her sister’s, sets off on a road trip to get away from her parents and complete all the items on her bucket list. At the top of the list: visiting Kurt Cobain’s Seattle residence. Grunge is Nico’s musical genre of choice, Cobain her savior – especially in the wake of the tragedy. On her drive from LA to Seattle, Nico climbs mountains, meets new people and even takes a turn at the mic herself. By the time she makes her way back home, Nico gets a whole lot more out of the trip than she expected.

Nico’s story of redemption rising from the ashes of self-destruction is engaging, if a bit predictable. Goldberg has brilliantly chosen to set the plot over a brief, fixed period of time. There is some exposition, but the bulk of the story is set over the course of Nico’s road trip – about two weeks. Nico spends time in each chapter with new people and experiences new things. Timing constraints are bolstered by precision in character development. Goldberg’s focus is Nico and Nico only. It’s a constraint that intensifies the weight of Nico’s situation and allows us to forgive the fact that some of the other characters fall shy of fully formed. Nico is simultaneously immature and wise beyond her years, having experienced a loss that no child should have to endure. Her destructive actions against the backdrop of her insecurities illustrate her struggle to find balance, peace and her identity. It is impossible not to root for her.

The description of Runaway Train includes the following, “Runaway Train is a wild journey of a bygone era…” How unbelievable that the 1990's are now considered a bygone era. I realize that reveals my age. However, the premise of the book relies on the fact that Nico is on her journey alone. That is, her decision to suddenly disconnect from her life mirrors the disconnect she has felt all along, a premise that does not exist in our constantly connected culture. I suppose that makes Runaway Train bildungsroman with a touch of historical fiction. Filled with humor and heart, Runaway Train is hard to put down. Get your Runaway Train ticket when the book is released on April 29th.