Are Books Essential Business?

I have been reading Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain these last few weeks. I picked it up because I had two points of “contact” with this book — 1.) a new client who listed it as part of her inspiration for the book she is writing and 2.) a friend who had just finished a dog-eared paperback who asked if I wanted to read it because he thought it was a great escapist read. Whenever a book makes itself known to me like that — I hear about it on the radio and then my daughter mentions it; I see a review in the paper and then I see someone reading it on an airplane (remember airplane travel?) — I try to pay attention. It’s as if the universe is saying, “Tune in!”

Bourdain’s memoir has a somewhat absurd slant. It depicts a life of excess that is far beyond anything I have ever seen or even imagined — a life far off the map of my lived experience. But his writing is vivid and alive. The way he describes people and restaurants and food makes those things leap off the page. It’s the perfect book to have falling into my lap just now.

Each night after navigating the strange reality of running a business in the time of a pandemic and dealing with the fears and needs of two households of 80-year-olds (my parents, who don’t live with each other), and trying to be there for my daughter whose wedding looks like it might have to be canceled, I give my time over to Anthony Bourdain.

He makes me marvel.

He makes me laugh.

He makes me cringe.

He has done what all good authors do, which is to offer the reader an experience that takes us out of our own small minds and our own small concerns.

His book is, to me, essential business right now.

My younger daughter — the maid of honor, not the bride — is living with us now, teaching 7th-grade history from the spare bedroom over Zoom. When she fled San Francisco the day they shut it down, she threw a bunch of clothes and provisions in her car. Among the things that made the cut was a thick copy of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat. Emily claims — correctly — that I didn’t teach her to cook properly (I cook everything on high and burn everything I touch), so she has been learning from Samin.

Last week, Emily roasted a chicken that she marinated in yogurt and salt for 24 hours and she served it with a crispy leek and Brussels sprouts dish. She chops her vegetables in perfect little uniform pieces because that’s how they cook well. She gets the oil in the pan hot before the vegetables go in because that’s how they get crispy without causing them to char. She says that cooking feels meditative to her, peaceful. She looks forward to making good food at the end of her long days of remote teaching.

Nosrat’s book is essential business to her just now.

I find it quite magical the way books come to us at just the right time, but it happens — again and again and again.

Among the things I am grateful for in the midst of this craziness are the authors who once upon a time decided that it was essential business for them to do the hard work of making something worthy of reading.

There was no doubt a day when they thought their book was not worth writing; when they thought that others had already said everything there was to say about cooking; when they wondered if anyone would care about their viewpoint, their stories, their ideas.

Yet here we are, caring very much, because these books are a gateway to forgetting and to learning, to imagining and hoping, to inspiration and peace.