Voices on Writing:
Conference Keynote Speaker Molly O'Neill
by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

Molly O'Neill grew up in Columbus, Ohio as the oldest child—and only girl—in a family of five kids. For ten years she worked as a chef and studied cooking at La Varenne in Paris. She worked as a columnist for Boston Magazine and Food & Wine Magazine before becoming the restaurant critic for New York Newsday. In 1991, she moved to the New York Times where she served as a reporter for the style section of the daily paper and the food columnist for the paper's Sunday magazine until 2001. She is the author of three cookbooks, including the bestselling New York Cookbook, A Well-Seasoned Appetite, and The Pleasure of Your Company. She also hosted the PBS series "Great Food."

O'Neill won the Julia Child/IACP Award for cookbooks and was awarded three James Beard Society citations for books, journalism, and television as well as the society's Lifetime Achievement Award. She has twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and over the past quarter-century has become one of the most recognized and respected food writers in America. Mostly True, her memoir of growing up in a major league baseball family, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2006. Her work has appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, Reader's Digest and Life. Her next book, One Big Table, Portrait of a Nation, will be published by Simon & Schuster in April 2010.

BDB: I'm so curious about how you got involved in food writing. Were you a foodie as a child?

MO: I do not think that there was such a thing as a foodie when I grew up. There certainly wasn't in Columbus, Ohio. There were fat people and skinny people and I was closer to the former than the latter. There were clean-platers and pickers. Nobody in my house picked.

BDB: With all those brothers, did you cook for them?

MO: I helped my mother in the kitchen for an hour every day. Mostly I set the table and did the dishes. But on the rare occasions that my parents went out for the evening, I secretly made my brothers the food they craved—cheesy "manwiches," individual pizzas made from hamburger buns with catsup and American cheese, the sort of stuff that my parents would not allow in the house. My facility with making forbidden junk food and lying about it turned my brothers into my luv [sic] slaves. Food is a powerful thing.

BDB: How did you break in as columnist for Boston Magazine?

MO: [Long story short], Don Forst, a former editor from The New York Times and New York Herald Tribune, who was then editor of Boston Magazine, called and said: "If you want to be a good food writer, you just keep doing what you are doing. If you want to be a great food writer, come and work with me." This was an irresistible offer. I was raised to be a competitor. That drive is so powerful that I didn't think twice about giving up a $50,000-a-year gig to work for $300 a month freelancing at Boston Mag.

BDB: Were you always a specialist? What are the advantages (and disadvantages) of being a specialist?

MO: At Boston Mag, I was forced to write about everything—cops, robbers, business, gossip, fashion, flower shows, and dogs shows—in order to earn the monthly privilege of writing about food and wine. I had talent as a profiler and would have been just as happy—perhaps even happier—writing about people. At The New York Times, I did general-assignment trend reporting and liked that very much as well. Fortunately and unfortunately, I was able to do something that was rare at that time—cook and write a sentence—plus I was female. Having been in the food service industry, I was intensely well-connected and, though I'm not naturally a bitch, I am not easily bullshitted. Food was just beginning to be taken seriously and so that was a useful combination. In my experience, generalists are better people, happier people and smarter people. Specialists make more money. Just ask your cardiologist or your colonoscopist.

BDB: Of course our members will want to know how you broke into The New Yorker.

MO: I emailed the editor with a story idea and it happened to be a story that filled a certain need in the magazine on that particular day. I did the story well—I spent three months reporting and writing 6,000 words which, pay-wise, put me back in the Boston Magazine level—and so I got another assignment.

BDB: Does a cookbook begin with a book proposal, like other nonfiction books?

MO: It should. You can write your way to the story when you are working on fiction or creative nonfiction. But if you do that with cookbooks, it will take you approximately three lifetimes to finish a book. My cookbook proposals are my outline. I deliver exactly what the publisher buys.

BDB: I'm guessing the cookbooks came after you'd been doing food writing for some time.

MO: No. I was still a chef when Lillian Hellman, a customer at the restaurant, asked me to work with her and Peter Feibleman on a culinary memoir that they were planning. I also ghosted a few books before I started writing under my own name. I was approached by Peter Workman to do New York Cookbook, probably because nobody else was dumb enough to do a five-year project for $35,000. The approach I developed with the New York Cookbook—basically using oral history as a reporting technique—is one of the few things I am actually good at.

BDB: How much time might you spend creating recipes and trying them before including them in a cookbook?

MO: I am about the worst person in the world to develop, test, or write a recipe. I am a natural cook; I cook by my wits and my senses and am constitutionally incapable of following directions. People like me flip through magazines or books, get an idea, and go cook. Recipe-followers are different sorts of people. They tend to be literalists with no sense of humor and even less common sense. They are not the kind of people who like me or my work. I'm pretty sure they read me in order to have a new reason to feel morally superior. However, they do read me and therefore, I have to have foolproof accurate recipes and, thank God, a group of tough, brilliant, nitpicking recipe testers/editors have, for reasons that totally escape me, worked for me, put up with me, and saved me from myself for more than 20 years. I brainstorm ideas, or even make something and they make sense of it.

BDB: I'm guessing that one compelling feature of your food writing are your similes and metaphors. Here's something you wrote in a NYT article about soup: "Soup can also be as risky as a road trip in a blizzard." How important is the visual component of food writing?

MO: My food writing is as strong as it is visceral. That's what I do. My job is to figure out what aspect of human hunger your subject can soothe. If I am writing about fiddlehead ferns, I need to get inside the hunger to connect to nature, the fear of the unknown, the danger of the woods when you don't know what you are doing, the appalling amount of mud you track into the house after you've slogged around looking for unborn fiddleheads—and then deliver the payoff. I have to inhabit the part of the human appetite that makes fiddleheads worthwhile. I have to do this because my food writing is about reminding people of their human-ness, their creaturely-ness, their connectedness to something greater than themselves. Part of doing that is to play with the reader's senses—sight, smell, touch, the yum, and the revulsion. You do that by surprising people enough to engage their passion. By making them sit up and say, "What the heck is she on— a road trip in a blizzard? Where's the barf bag? Jesus, O'Neill, get a grip."

There are a few sure emotional points in modern Americans. Anger is the most powerful. Anger is an umbrella for all the things that people are embarassed to feel—sadness, fear, embarrassment, etc. The need to be "better than" is another easy thing to engage. Melodrama and sentimentality are other "masks" for real feeling. In any given piece, I do my best to play these and other, more subtle notes because I want to grab people in the place that makes them feel. And then I want to serve them a little piece of daily life in a way that transforms those false feelings into real moments of gratitude, hope, forgiveness, humor. I use food to remind people that we are human, and we are all in this together. The senses are my allies. One problem in this is that in writing, like in a well-constructed dish, sweetness only exists in relationship to the sour, salty, bitter, and hot. Because more commercial food writing these days—and by this I mean any food writing for any publication that relies on advertising—is at great pains not to disturb or offend. That makes it quite difficult to engage the reader in any real way.

BDB: Your writing is visceral, too. Here's another: "Juniper berries make you feel taken care of in a let's-huddle-around -the-campfire sort of way." How hard do you work on these descriptors, or does it come easy to you?

MO: When I am in the zone, everything is easy and everything is possible. When I'm not, writing is, as Red Smith described (I am paraphrasing here): "...easy—you just open a vein."

BDB: Your titles are fun: "The Stick Shift," "Sweet and Lowdown," "Reality Bites." How important are titles or do you just figure the magazine you're writing for will change them anyway?

MO: Editors like to write headlines. Some, like the woman who edited me for years at The New York Times, are brilliant at it. I learned a lot from her. But I don't suggest headlines. Sometimes, I place certain phrases and images in the text in a way that makes them pop and become candidates for headlines.

BDB: You're a Yankees fan, sounds like. Do you make elaborate ballpark foods or do you buy from the stands?

MO: When we are winning, I am not hungry. When we are losing, I prefer to chew my nails.

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett is editor of The ASJA Monthly and author of the award-winning best-seller, Pen on Fire (Harcourt, 2004). She hosts Writers on Writing on KUCI-FM, which you can now access on your iPhone and which podcasts at http://penonfire.blogspot.com