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Friday, August 21, 2009

Restaurants Book review: Born Round by Frank Bruni

Posted by Besha Rodell @BeshaRodell on Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 4:14 PM

Anyone who has spent significant time struggling with weight will tell you how pervasive and frustrating that internal voice can be. The voice that tells you you’re ugly. The voice that chastises you for enjoying food. The voice that congratulates you for abstaining, that picks apart every culinary decision, that fixates on clothing sizes, that wears you down until you hate yourself for being so predictably sado-masochistic.

It’s this voice we become privy to in Frank Bruni’s new memoir, Born Round. Bruni, who has spent the last four years as restaurant critic for the New York Times, has written a book that chronicles in detail his lifelong tussle with his weight. Bruni recounts every self-doubting thought, every fluctuation in pants size, and the tortured conflict of emotions surrounding every mouthful of food.

In many ways, it’s a powerful story, highly relatable and familiar to many of us. But the book belabors in 368 pages what we know in the first few chapters – this man has a fraught relationship with food and self-image. The meticulous detailing of that relationship seems self-indulgent at best, at worst an unhealthy excuse to feed his neuroses.

What’s doubly frustrating is that Bruni is a great writer who has led an interesting life (I’m a huge fan of his criticism in the Times) – a memoir from him should be a worthy read. But while we get two paragraphs describing his time in the Middle East embedded with soldiers (the main point of which, it appears, is to mention army food), we get pages and pages devoted to exactly what kind of food is at his sister’s wedding and how much of it there is. It’s as if when Bruni ever got off track into some of the more interesting aspects of his life, his editors said, “food and weight. Bring it back to food and weight.” I have such faith in Bruni as a writer; I can’t imagine he would have chosen to produce such a one-note manuscript.

But this is a food book, right? Shouldn’t Bruni focus on food rather than, say, his time interviewing movie stars as a film critic for the Detroit Free Press? Perhaps, but Bruni’s relationship with food is so burdened, this is a food memoir with very little joy in it. Every mouthful has so much baggage, the food becomes the villain in the story.

I understand that this is the point – Bruni set out to write about overcoming that very feeling, that food is the enemy. But it’s too much – by the time we get to the part of the book where Bruni is seriously obese and in real trouble, we barely care, having spent chapters and chapters obsessing over 15 pounds and two pants sizes. We don’t get to know his lovers, friends or family members as characters because we spend so much time preoccupied with whether they’ve noticed that one pants size or not. And while this may be the reality of someone who is weight-challenged, it does not make for particularly interesting reading.

The best chapters happen near the end of the book, when Bruni becomes the critic at the New York Times and leaves the obsessing behind to focus on what that job entails. But it’s too little too late.

Yes, many of us know that voice that chastises and obsesses about every bite, taking the pleasure and sensuality out of food and life. The problem is, that voice is less than pleasant to live with - a whole book of it is a hard sell.

Tags: Food media, New-York-Times, Frank Bruni, Born Round, Restaurants