Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table

Tender at the Bone author Ruth Reichl was born in 1948. She was raised primarily in New York’s Greenwich Village and at her family’s summer home in Connecticut, with some of her childhood also spent at a boarding school in Montreal, Canada. She later earned degrees in sociology and art history from the University of Michigan. She met her first husband, artist Doug Hollis, while she was a student at the University of Michigan. Although she would later divorce Hollis and marry investigative reporter Michael Singer, it is the early days of her relationship with Doug that Reichl explores in Tender at the Bone.

After finishing college, Reichl and Doug lived for a time in Berkeley, California, where Reichl became co-owner of a highly regarded restaurant called The Swallow. Although she had worked in various restaurants in the front-of-house, this was her first foray into professional cooking. She published her first cookbook, Mmmmm: A Feastiary, in 1972. Two decades as a food critic for prestigious publications like the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times turned Reichl into one of America’s foremost food writers. She served as editor-in-chief at Gourmet magazine for 10 years, hosted the PBS show Gourmet’s Adventures With Ruth, and co-produced PBS’s Gourmet’s Diary of a Foodie.