I just finished reading Frank Bruni's autobiography "Born Round"
Everyone's a critic, right? But it truly does seem like a dream job to get to eat multi-course meals at all the best restaurants in town and then have the power to uplift or skewer their trajectories. Basically writing+food=happiness. Yay!
But the path to this dream job was harder for Bruni, who recently retired after a five year stint as the NYT restaurant critic. The book is astonishingly frank (no pun intended) as it discusses Bruni's eating disorders, body hate and eventual path towards a sort of punishing exercise routine to balance out the thousands of calories he consumed every night. The highlights of Born Round are Bruni's honesty and his likability as a byronic hero.
The worst of it his body hate, the complete opposite of the current trend toward fat acceptance. For anyone who finds themselves fat and happy, reading through Bruni's cycles of bingeing & purging along with his own caustic self disgust is not really helpful. In fact it's a pretty big slide backwards. Bruni's answer to his own fat is to exercise 80 minutes plus 2 out of every 3 days with the help of a couple of trainers. That's great for him, but what about all the other fatties? Why isn't it ever okay to be fat, to eat what you want, and to exercise at a normal, manageable and affordable rate? These issues are impossible to avoid in Bruni's book.
The book ends on a more even note. Bruni was able to satiate his hunger- a larger hunger than others, he allows- and enjoy his tenure as a food critic. He learns to like his imperfect body and share it with others. Born Round is an interesting, compelling read. I just wish our society was not poisoned with such body hate in the first place or as Bruni points out, the need to super size everything. There has to be a happy balance somewhere!
