For this Piccolo we’re reading Insatiable: Tales From a Life of Delicious Excess, by Gael Greene, Acknowledgements, Chapters 42-51, (pp. 282-357).
Chapter 51 ends: “I can’t wait to taste the food of the third generation of great American chefs. I can’t wait to see what madness young rebels are cooking up in Spain. I’m ready to explore the rustic backlash in France. I fully expect to go on eating and critiquing forever and that on my deathbed my last words will echo those of Brillat-Savarin’s sister, who cried, “Bring on dessert. I’m about to die.”
Our Piccolo is a quick, short, Book Group meeting at a local coffee house on Mondays, noon – 1pm. We’re meeting at Acre Coffee in Montgomery Village, Santa Rosa.
The selections are from light, chatty, gossipy storytelling.
No need to RSVP. Just drop by for a piccolo.
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THIRTY years ago, in her steamy novel “Blue Skies, No Candy,” Gael Greene used the language of food to show men “what sex could feel like to a woman.” In “Insatiable: Tales From a Life of Delicious Excess,” her frank and funny new memoir of her life and loves and the decades she spent as New York magazine’s restaurant critic, she explains her approach to that early fiction: “I used all the senses, all the sensory words I used to describe food — the taste and smell of it, the sound and heat.” She was stunned when male critics scolded her: “I truly thought there was an audience out there ready to discover a woman’s sheer carnal joy.” Nonetheless, notoriety was her friend. When the Metropolitan Transportation Authority banned the subway ads for the novel’s paperback edition — which showed a woman undoing a man’s zipper — half a million copies sold in one week. More…
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