Ruth Reichl

To Speak at the WIT Festival

The Words, Ideas and Thinkers (WIT) Festival returns to the Berkshires for the third time this year with a rich array of novelists, playwrights, journalists, translators, poets, critics, historians and essayists, all exploring the theme, The Power of Words: Why Writers Matter.

The festival, sponsored by the Authors Guild, will be held Friday, September 27th through September 29th at Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street.

Eight conversational pairings have been announced with noted personalities such as playwright Tony Kushner and TV political analyst Rachel Maddow; award-winning novelists Jennifer Egan and Joseph O’Neill, and literary historian Stephen Greenblatt and scholar-translator Emily Wilson.

Also appearing will be essayist Cathy Park Hong with Arab-Israeli novelist and newspaper columnist Sayed Kashua; national leaders in the fields of civil rights and higher education, Sherrilyn Ifill and Ruth Simmons; journalist and editor Sandra Guzmán with fiction writer Jamaica Kincaid; and Latin writers Luis Alberto Urrea and Marie Arana.

“The festival is just wonderful,” said noted food writer Ruth Reichl. “I go every year. The WIT Festival is like a gift to the people.”

This year will be different for Reichl, however. She will go as a participant rather than as an audience member, joining author Monica Troung in a conversation about food in literature. Reichl has more than enough “creds” for that conversation. She is the author of many cookbooks and memoirs, was a food critic for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times for two decades, did a stint as editor-in-chief at Gourmet magazine from 1999-2009, has created documentaries, a newsletter about food writing published on Substack and, most recently, published The Paris Novel.

The novel tells the story of a repressed American woman whose inheritance from her estranged mother is a one-way plane ticket and the instruction to “Go to Paris.” There, the protagonist, Stella, embarks on a journey of self-discovery that unfolds deliciously after she impulsively buys a vintage Dior dress and dines at the iconic brasserie Les Deux Magots.

“It’s my second novel,” Reichl said in a phone interview from an airport where she had been inconveniently delayed. No, she said, it had not been a stretch to jump from being a cookbook author and food critic to becoming a novelist.

“When I went to write the first one (Delicious!, 2014), my editor said my memoirs read like novels, so it was not such a leap,” she explained. “And it is so much more fun—you don’t have to worry about people’s feelings.”

The novel allowed her to “write about all the things I am passionate about—all the things that matter most to me are in the book. It’s really about the power of pleasure.”

Stella, “having had a traumatic childhood, never allowed herself pleasures,” Reichl said. “She made her world very small by being safe. Then she tries on this dress and sees herself as different person. She becomes a different person through art, books and food.”

Stella’s restricted life is not unusual, Reichl asserts. “We live in a world of very Puritan people and don’t understand that pleasure is an important part of life,” she said. “One of the ways we become grateful for life is through our senses. We have this possibility of moments of grace every day if we open ourselves up to that and take a bite of the peach.”

Reichl has never restricted her own life. Raised in Greenwich Village, daughter of a German-Jewish refugee father and an American-Jewish mother, she attended a boarding school in Montreal and earned a B.A. in sociology and an M.A. in art history, both from the University of Michigan.

Soon after, she and her first husband moved to Berkeley CA where her interest in food led her to become a chef and co-owner of the Swallow Restaurant. Almost simultaneously, she began her food-writing career with Mmmmm: A Festiary, the first of many cookbooks and the beginning of a distinguished career as a food critic, editor and author.

“I wrote my first cookbook when I was 21,” she recalled. “It was a very different time than it is now. Later at Gourmet, I learned testing. We had 12 cooks, and we might say, ‘What if we did a Scandinavian meal?’ We would research and do the dishes over and over again and get them as good as we could. Then, you have to think about language … .

“The language of cookbooks changes every few years,” she continued. “At Gourmet in the ’50s they expected cooks to know things, so the recipe would say, “Broil one duck.” Now, cookbooks tell you how to buy the duck, prepare the duck, the 20 steps before you broil the duck. You cannot assume knowledge.”

And the presentation of cookbooks has changed, as well. They have become larger, more elaborate, usually beautifully illustrated—and not necessarily destined for the kitchen. “Most people use only one or two recipes from a cookbook,” she said. “Often, they are bedside reading. People enjoy reading about meals.”

Since Gourmet folded, Reichl has been fulfilling a five-book contract, has launched her Substack newsletter about the food system, and created a documentary, Food and Country, which examined the impact of the pandemic on independent farmers and chefs. “I spent all of Covid making the movie with director Laura Gabbert,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be in it but because of Covid everyone was shut down. I did all the research and she ended up using the Zoom recordings.”

Researching the film was the equivalent of “going to grad school about food,” she said. While agriculture has been concentrated in the Midwest and western states in recent decades, she predicts that the East will regain its former importance as a center of production.

“In this time of floods and fires everywhere, we will have to be a center of food production,” she said.

Reichl will be joined on the stage at WIT by Monica Troung, an author whose novels frequently use food as metaphors. Her first novel, The Book of Salt, was a national bestseller and was followed by Bitter in the Mouth and The Sweetest Fruits.

“I will appear with Monica, who wrote some pieces for me at Gourmet,” Reichl said. “She’s done several novels that concern cooking, one about Gertrude Stein’s cook. She understands food, Paris and process.”

For a full schedule please click the link below. Tickets are on sale now. Buy early as they go fast.

The Authors Guild is the nation’s oldest and largest professional organization for published writers and advocates on behalf of working writers to protect free speech and freedom of expression and authors’ copyrights.