For this Piccolo we’re reading Insatiable: Tales From a Life of Delicious Excess, by Gael Greene, Acknowledgements, Prelude, Chapters 1-10, (pp. xi-55).
The Prelude starts: “I could embellish the story and write that I was just pulling a par of crusty French baguettes out of the oven the fall afternoon of the momentous phone call. I like that image. But then how could you trust me? The unadorned truth is that I was more likely mashing an excess of Hellman’s mayonnaise and a dot of Dijon musterd into some canned tuna. (…) It was Clay Felker, asking me to be the restaurant critic of his infant New York magazine, just launched a few months earlier, in April 1968, and already provoking major buzz.”
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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