The Naked Truth
Everyone who reads my blog knows I am in love with Anthony Bourdain. He has no idea who I am, but . . . I remain hopeful. Perhaps if I blog about him for long enough, someone who knows him will read this and he will want to come and do some shots of Black Death with me. My best friend, Pammie, tells me that if Anthony and I ever DO get together, she'd give it a year until we were dead. Not dead as in we would kill each other. But dead as in we would bring out the absolute worst in one another and would last be seen doing all sorts of shots in some strange little country where we would undoubtedly get eaten by cannibals.
But I digress. One reason I adore him is Kitchen Confidential. If you haven't read it, run out and buy it. He rocks as a writer. And one reason he does is he explores a subculture and nails it. Because nothing will expose you as a fraud faster than not nailing the subculture you are writing about. The restaurant biz, where I and millions of other have toiled, is truly its own world, where you can do tequila shots on the line caked in sauces, and party til dawn after hours with the chef, and the next day start it all over again.
When I wrote about my time spent in John's Bar in The Roofer, I think I captured the place. The real place. And I captured the apartments of my youth where the radiator was on Full Blast Temperature of Hell and there was no moderating it in wintertime, not even on Christmas when the place was so packed with people, it felt like a sauna. The Hiroshima cloud of smoke in the rooms and the bars, the nicotine-covered walls, the patina of yellow-brown on EVERYTHING. The coldwater flat of my grandmother. The bums in the hall.
If you write YAs, teens will spot a fake faster than I can blink an eye. If you play poker, as Lulu does in The Poker Diaries, you can spot a lousy bluffer, a fake, from what they have on the table, and what they do. Their "tells." And when teens write me, they tell me Lulu is "real." I take that as the highest compliment coming from a teen.
In short, if you are going to write about a world not familiar to most, but achingly familiar to the people who embody it, you better not be a fraud. You need to tell the naked truth. Show it all.
People ask me all the time how I research things. I say, truthfully, I'm a student of life. I can spot the nuances. I can live in the subculture. I'll drink Black Death if I have to.
So, here's to a shot of Black Death. And the naked truth.
But I digress. One reason I adore him is Kitchen Confidential. If you haven't read it, run out and buy it. He rocks as a writer. And one reason he does is he explores a subculture and nails it. Because nothing will expose you as a fraud faster than not nailing the subculture you are writing about. The restaurant biz, where I and millions of other have toiled, is truly its own world, where you can do tequila shots on the line caked in sauces, and party til dawn after hours with the chef, and the next day start it all over again.
When I wrote about my time spent in John's Bar in The Roofer, I think I captured the place. The real place. And I captured the apartments of my youth where the radiator was on Full Blast Temperature of Hell and there was no moderating it in wintertime, not even on Christmas when the place was so packed with people, it felt like a sauna. The Hiroshima cloud of smoke in the rooms and the bars, the nicotine-covered walls, the patina of yellow-brown on EVERYTHING. The coldwater flat of my grandmother. The bums in the hall.
If you write YAs, teens will spot a fake faster than I can blink an eye. If you play poker, as Lulu does in The Poker Diaries, you can spot a lousy bluffer, a fake, from what they have on the table, and what they do. Their "tells." And when teens write me, they tell me Lulu is "real." I take that as the highest compliment coming from a teen.
In short, if you are going to write about a world not familiar to most, but achingly familiar to the people who embody it, you better not be a fraud. You need to tell the naked truth. Show it all.
People ask me all the time how I research things. I say, truthfully, I'm a student of life. I can spot the nuances. I can live in the subculture. I'll drink Black Death if I have to.
So, here's to a shot of Black Death. And the naked truth.
posted by Erica Orloff at 11:29 AM
4 Comments:
Amen.
Create the world you know; or, at least, know the world you create.
And, for chrissake, don't eat beating hearts with ANYBODY named Anthony. ;)
Cheers! Black Death for breakfast. Hmm. Think I've entered a new subculture now for sure.
WTG for winning over the YA crowd. I can't do it at all. ??? I'm surrounded by them, I understand them, I listen to them, but I can't put them on paper.
Haven't read Kitchen Confidential. Spent lots of time in kitchens though. Any points for that? :)
Jude:
I think it's the latter. No shortcuts to knowing a world.
And much as I adore Anthony and swoon over him, I would not eat a still-beating heart with anyone. I would have to traverse the globe with him drinking black death but being a vegan (something he despises). ;-)
E
Lainey:
Points for that. It's really about the restaurant crowd, the whole patois of working in a kitchen . . . you know, the way everyone talks, drinks, swaggers. I remember the first place I waited tables. A german chef was so pissed at something, he hurled a half-full keg (or so it seems) of tomato sauce at the wall, which landed on poor little me. But after cleaning me up, somehow I had earned my stripes in the kitchen, and I was pretty hooked.
E
Post a Comment
<< Home