book double feature: blood, bones and butter + behind the beautiful forevers

check out all those b's above. that is a beauitful bunch of baby b's.

the first bounty of b's is blood, bones and butter by gabrielle hamilton. it is one-half true-life account of one woman's journey to become a celebrity chef and one-half the crazed ramblings of a woman of striking out against the world. the first half is really very good. it is an honest account of the hard work that goes into running a kitchen and how unglamorous and ugly cooking can be, despite how cooking blogs and tv try to present that world. unfortunately the second half she decides to write an extended rant against her italian husband and how mean he is for introducing her into the world of italian villas and big gracious italian families. she has an annoying knack for playing both the superior cultural elite and hapless victim. the book ends with her finally finding happiness by exchanging her lovely, worldly mother for a slightly more exotic one.

behind the beautiful forevers genuinely shocked me. it was not so much the content of the story, which was genuinely shocking, but the fact that it was a work of non-fiction. i clearly did not know much about the book before i started reading it but, in my defense, it was written in the guise of a fiction. the author went inside the head of the characters. action happened seemingly in real-time. people, places and events had a larger than life literary bent to them. i was happy to accept it as a perfectly good account of poverty and tragedy in india, one of many these days. and then i hit the afterward in which the author explains the research, how she lived with these people, these real people, places, events and how she tried to accurately convey everything she witnessed in the preceding pages. it seemed fictional because it was a stylistic choice and i think a smart one. the fact that it was revealed only afterward to be a true life account made it all the more visceral to me. it was a beautiful depiction of a life with many unhappy endings and truly only the tiniest slivers of happy ones.