Tell us about ‘Eating with My Mouth Open’.
‘Eating with My Mouth Open’ is about the complex relationships we have with food, and the role of memory in those relationships. I was drawn to the topic because within my own family there are very different attitudes to food: my dad’s a chef and a food enthusiast, and my mum’s been overweight and dieting for as long as I can remember — I sit somewhere in between, and that’s a compelling point of tension, and an interesting starting point for exploring a difficult idea.
What is a constant in your life, even as other things change?
The drive to metaphor. My writer-brain can’t just let things be literal; there’s always some potential for parallels in everything.
What do you think of writing that blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction? Does the line matter?
I love it. Yes, the line matters — but we’re writing in a time now where readers are savvy enough to know that the line is a blurry one and that even the straightest of biographies is necessarily produced. I find the blurry space between the two exciting — and more honest than any pretence at being able to represent a definitive truth.
Which nonfiction writer would you most like to have a drink with, and why?
I’d like to have a drink with Montaigne. He was so cool about essays — he didn’t pretend to be sure about anything, and for him the whole idea of an essay was just to come at an idea with curiosity. The word ‘essai’ means, literally, ‘attempt’ or ‘trial’. What a laid-back approach to writing something meaningful.
What was the last book you had trouble finishing, and why?
David E. Sutton’s Remembrance of Repasts. It’s a sociological text, and it was immensely useful when I started reading it — it started with very broad ideas around food and memory, and some great, specific material about Kalymnian food rituals. As it went on it got too specific — I eventually realised I had taken what I needed from the book, couldn’t be bothered renewing it again, and that I didn’t actually have to finish it if I wasn’t getting anything out of it.
Which nonfiction writers are doing the most interesting things with the form at the moment, do you think?
I enjoy Ander Monson’s work a lot — his latest, Letter to a Future Lover, takes marginalia and bits and pieces found in library books as the starting point for an exploration of readers, reading, and books. I enjoy Monson’s work so much because form never feels like a gimmick for him — all experiments seem absolutely necessary, and are the best possible way for an idea to be explored. It’s also hugely fun to read.
If you were allowed to award a prize for nonfiction writing to one of the following books, which would you choose? Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Joan Didion’s The White Album, Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, or Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is a personal favourite, and I think it’s a milestone text for many writers. It provoked so many ‘You can do that?’ moments, and shifted the way so many people thought about how the material mined from their own life could be used, and what a memoir needed to be. Playful, and tragic, and hilarious, and transparent; true but also unreliable. It’s possible for a book to be all these things at the same time.