Blue Plate Special

An Autobiography of My Appetites

By: Kate Christensen

Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert

Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's summary

That the greatly admired novelist Kate Christensen has turned to the memoir form after six novels makes this book an event. Readers of memoirs of high literary quality, particularly those with food themes - most conspicuously Ruth Reichl's Comfort Me with Apples and Gabrielle Hamilton's Blood, Bones, and Butter - as well as admirers of M. F. K. Fisher and Laurie Colwin will be a large and eager audience.

This memoir derives from Kate's popular foodcentric blog, in which she shares scenes from an unusual upbringing and an unusually happy present-day life, providing an audience for this book that is already primed. That it is written by Kate Christensen means it will be a delicious reading experience in every sense - a compulsively listenable account of a knockabout life, full of sorrows and pleasures, many of the latter of the sensual, appetitive variety.

©2013 Kate Christensen (P)2013 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"I’ve often thought that eating, writing and living well required similar qualities: creativity, daring, the ability to savor the good stuff and learn from the bad. Blue Plate Special is the memoir of an utterly original thinker, a free-spirited gourmand, and a great American writer. It’s an expert guide on inspiration, ingenuity, heartbreak, buoyancy, home, love, family, screwing up, bouncing back, and perfecting the bacon-cheddar biscuit." (Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl, Dark Places, and Sharp Objects)

" Blue Plate Special is the evocative, irresistible tale of the life and loves of one of America’s greatest writers, Kate Christensen. Her loves include: Family, friends, men, travel, literature, but perhaps most of all, food. This is a breathtaking book, sensuously written, emotionally generous, and decadent as a bowl of macaroni and cheese." (Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins)

The food!

I went on a food journey when Covid hit and I gave birth to my second child. My father had died 3 weeks before I gave birth and my in-laws moved to town 2 weeks before I gave birth. Teddy was born 4/2/2020 so everything was raw and sad, yet joyous and amazing. We quickly fell into a pattern of extravagant nightly dinners, where I chopped, mixed, simmered, and sautéed multi part suppers and my husband’s parents quietly cleaned up while we tended to nightly routine. I ended up printing a photo book of our year in food and each meal reminds me of the details that ensued.

Compelling in lots of ways, from start to finish.

What made the experience of listening to Blue Plate Special the most enjoyable?

Kate Christensen has a lot of unique experiences growing up in various parts of the country (under various conditions) and later Europe, with unusual parents and extended family. She has a front row seat for some pretty exceptional experiences: living in France, the Iowa Writer's Workshop and working in NYC in the late nineties while living in pre-gentrified Williamsburg. Her voice is genuine and charming and I couldn't stop thinking about her when I wasn't listening.The only distraction is the narrator's voice, which has an affected, overly-respiratory breathiness that reminded me of an "I can't Believe it's Not Butter" commercial. You can get past it though, easy. Just would have been cooler if she'd read it herself. Reminded me lots of Blood, Bones and Butter.

Disappointing and Shallow

I grabbed this book as soon as I heard an interview with the author on NPR. Based on that, I wanted to read anything by Kate Christenson and thus I was expecting a much more introspective exploration of her life. What I got instead was an extended list of unexamined life experiences, rendered factually and sounding totally banal by the narrator's sing-song-y voice. Every event, situation, item in the physical environment was made to seem oh-so "precious", with unnecessary detail which after a few chapters became just tiresome. Perhaps in the hands of a less chirpy narrator, this book would have more heft and substance. But performed as is, "Blue Plate Special" is the new "Eat Pray Love", with the same shallow, self-referential descriptions that make it a picaresque pseudo-adventure for the privileged.

Actually, the "I", Kate, the narrator of this memoir is not nearly as interesting as her mother, with her multiple marriages, breakdowns, struggles and angst, and the listener only gets a random flash of her as background noise. Sometimes I kept reading just for the purpose of finding out more of what was going on with the mom in the story.

I can't say that this book is ruined by the narrator (although for me it was), or simply that IMO Tavia Gilbert's birdsong reading gives a shallow rendering to what might be an interesting life. Might read better in print.

I'll give it a "3", though, because it satisfies one of my basic standards of read-worthiness: it's entertaining.