A writer's life, a chef's life

an autobiography in miniature

It’s a rainy Saturday here in New York, readers. The perfect sort of day to curl up with a little story.

This is the first section of a four part autobiography. It attempts to weave the two formal elements of my life, literature and culinary arts, into a rope that led me to this moment, writing to you, where suddenly I am free. In other words, I'm tasked with explaining myself. Every fiber in my quailing heart wants to follow the example of Tristam Shandy and endlessly digress until the universe goes silent. But I'll do my best to tell it plainly, which is fitting, as the story starts on the Great Plains, where I was raised.

For those who haven't experienced it, the precarity and isolation of the rural poor is difficult and unwelcome to imagine. I will not dwell on it beyond this invocation, but the detail hides the devil, to gloss upon a familiar phrase. My biological father was a drug dealer, a petty crook, a roller skating ne'er-do-well who abandoned us after the birth of my sister when I was two years old. We were raised by our mother in rural Saline County, Kansas. She worked many jobs, often at the same time, but I've come to think of her mostly as a farm worker. She milked cows, trained horses, raised dogs. We were Murphys, descended from my Great Grandfather who left colonized Ireland to help colonize another land.

Here's me at six years old, creeping up the concrete stairs from the basement at three in the morning to find Mom slumbering on the couch, too exhausted to hear the alarm for her milking shift. She's so finely tuned to my voice that only a whisper will wake her. Mom. She shoots up and starts getting ready, donning the rubber overalls hung by the door before she's even fully awake. Sometimes she brings me along and I cast myself out into the starry fields, calling the heifers to the milking room, working on my planets and constellations, belonging to the night as I've never belonged the day. I lived an entire nocturnal life of bulls, bull snakes, peacocks and raccoons before the bus picked me up for school. The dairyman, already in his sixties, would unrelentingly tease me by asking if I had any girlfriends yet, and, even though it is more than thirty years distant and he's in the grave, I'd like to say: that was creepy, sir, and no one liked it.

I was an early, voracious reader, an outsider in the way precocious children are, but also in the way poor children are, for many parents did not want their children to play with us, and the way farm kids are, having chores after school instead of shenanigans. I was at home, however, in books, and among the procession of sick, wounded, discarded, or orphaned animals, the dogs, cats, pigs, goats, rabbits, geese and horses for whom our mother was fated to care.

With our mother working most of her waking hours, my sister and I raised ourselves, and I first tasted the joys of nourishing others through the necessity of feeding my family. Mostly it was generic macaroni and cheese and discarded frozen pizzas from the local factory we had to hammer, chip and carve from the larger mass, but occasionally a ripe tomato would come from a charitable neighbor. The dairies sometimes gave us fresh, raw milk, ground beef or even cheese wrapped in red wax, and when we kept up with the chickens, the eggs were good. We did not go to restaurants, save for the steak buffet chain on Tuesdays, when kids ate free, or Key Mars, owned by refugees from the Vietnam war, and deserving of its own edition of this newsletter. As a child cook, I enjoyed the pyrrhic victory of using two cheese packets in my mac and cheese, getting the runny yoke of a fried egg just right, or using some combination of random pantry items with a condiment or two and a thirty year old tin of smoked paprika to create what we called “poverty snacks.”

At eleven, I read, in a deeply idiosyncratic translation from the turn of the century, Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. Although I had been granted permission to use the high school library a couple years earlier, this book set everything in motion. What revolutionary force, what implacable ambition, what heresies and intimacies, what multitudes! It helped as well that Hugo saw the poor, like me, not with pity, nor as victims, but as ordinary humans under extraordinary pressure, capable of anything. Shortly after Jean Valjean was buried beneath a black slab in Pere Lachaise, I essayed a short story from the point of view of a hungry spider. In the creation of her world in the corner of a barn, her meal of wayward horsefly, I discovered the vocation from which I will never escape.

I stole Mr. Hugo's book—it had sat on its shelf, untouched, for thirty years—and it was only the first of many. I retrieved discarded paperbacks, their front covers torn away, from the bookstore dumpster at behind the mall. Eventually, when I began to be paid for the labor, I spent whatever I could on books. The public library was off-limits due to fines, and, moreover, because I wanted to keep most of the books that made me. At sixteen, I dropped out of high school and enrolled at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. By then, I had devoured most of the foundational texts of nineteenth and twentieth century world literature, with special attention paid to the mystics, the symbolists, the revolutionaries, and the magicians. I thought I'd be a writer and a scholar with a PhD before twenty five. Clearly, this plan went well awry.

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Tune in next week for the next installment of this version of my life. Once I get my schedule sorted, expect paid content on Tuesdays and free content on Thursdays. As always, thank you for reading.