Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table

“I learned early that the most important thing in life is a good story.”

Reichl’s Author’s Note explains that her memoir will contain slight alterations to factual details, timelines, and so on. She has made these changes in order to tell a more compelling story, one that can convey the “truth” of her experiences more accurately than a straightforward recitation of facts might do. This demonstrates Reichl’s commitment to art and her belief that art’s job is to present a coherent interpretation of reality and experience, not merely to reproduce “fact.” It is this aspect of storytelling that most interests her and that, for her, elevates it to “the most important thing in life.” This comment provides important insight into her desire to create genre-blending works that encompass her entire experience of food and life—recipes alone are not a coherent story, and Reichl values a “good story” above all.

“Some of the food had acquired a thin veneer of mold, but Mom blithely scraped it off and began mixing her terrible Horn & Hardart mush. ‘It’s delicious!’ she cried, holding out a spoonful. It wasn’t.”

The descriptive details and diction in this passage emphasize how disgusting Miriam’s food really is: Given the “thin veneer of mold” and the word “mush,” emphasizing how careless planning and technique result in something completely unappetizing, it is comically deluded for Miriam to excitedly declare the result “delicious!”—a fact that Reichl emphasizes with her abrupt, deadpan comment “It wasn’t.