Copyright © 2017 JKE Media Inc.
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ISBN 9780147530394
Ebook ISBN 9780147530400
Cover and book design: Lisa Jager
Cover and book photography: Jackie Kai Ellis
Published in Canada by Appetite by Random House®, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
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I dedicate this book to two people:
1. To M. F. K. Fisher, whose stories validated the beauty in living, inspiring me to do so.
2. To you, who may find yourself in this story. Inspiring you to find beauty in your own life would bring so much more to mine.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PREFACE
CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE (2007)
PORK and CHIVE DUMPLINGS (1921-2014)
CARROT CAKE with CREAM CHEESE FROSTING (1985-1992)
EGGPLANT BHARTA (2008)
THE TWIN (2010)
FARMERS’ MARKET · Vancouver (2008)
“GOOD” GRANOLA (2006-2011)
FARMERS’ MARKET · Paris (2011)
THE CONGO (2012)
TELL ME I’M BEAUTIFUL (2012)
LES PARISIENS (2011-2013)
THE DRESS (2011)
ITALY (2011)
A BRIDGE in LYON (2012)
EVERY SATURDAY MORNING (2007-2011)
A LITTLE KEY (2011)
A LETTER (2016)
THE CROISSANT (2012)
LETTING GO (2011-2014)
EGGS (1986-2011)
HOW to OPEN a FINANCIALLY SUCCESSFUL BAKERY (2012)
LETTING GO (2012)
HOW to OPEN a FINANCIALLY SUCCESSFUL BAKERY (2013)
THE MEASURE of MY POWERS (2016)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PREFACE
When I was first asked to write a memoir, I declined immediately. I was scared. Though, I was not afraid to recount my experiences in a Parisian pastry school, or of the opening of Beaucoup Bakery & Café, The Paris Tours, or even of how I became a writer. Over coffee, interviews, speeches, and articles, I shared these stories proudly.
I could easily tell the happier, abbreviated versions of my memories, the ones with easy endings, because I assumed no one would be interested in the others. I was concerned about making others feel awkward if I was more candid. These struggles were painful to live and I presumed they were just as uncomfortable to hear—sometimes seeing another’s vulnerability accentuates our own. Truthfully, I was worried about what others might think of me. I wanted so desperately to be special, but I imagined they would see my flaws and weaknesses and think that I was unremarkable, and at the time, sometimes even now, a childish part of me was afraid of being judged.
So instead, I offered an excuse: my story is not yet done. But deep down inside, I knew I wanted to write it, and in reality our stories are rarely finished anyway.
I spent years skipping over the painful parts until I realized that, in those moments when I was telling my story, it was I who wasn’t ready to remember these harder moments in such detail. I had carefully put those darker memories away in a sturdy box and placed it in the back of a closet. It was a way to protect myself from the immense hurt that, at one time, I was drowning in, day after day. And I tried to forget these stories existed, ignoring them for as long as I could, tiptoeing around them, careful not to kick up their terrible dust.
After a few years passed, some of the hurt had healed, and I felt strong enough to peek inside the box again. I looked at the painful parts and grew to appreciate that my strength was found in the moments when I felt weakest, and that they were both beautifully and crucially intertwined. I began to understand that by refusing to write this memoir, I was only trying to avoid vulnerability. That was, frankly, not a good enough reason for me. So, knowing I was braver than my fears, I began to write, and when I did, I naturally thought of M. F. K. Fisher.
As I reread her books, I found myself once again in the pains and joys of her narratives. I was drawn again into her stories of Sunday picnics by swimming holes, eating peach pie with her silent father; of prewar France, warming segments of clementine on radiators while watching soldiers soldier on the streets below her bedroom window. I found myself laughing, amused by her sharp sense of humor—she titled one of her chapters “Pity the Blind in Palate.” I was taken by the way she placed modest words beside one another to create images, tastes, and smells so whole that I could have sworn the memories were my own.
When I first read her stories, those many years ago during the emptiest time in my life, Fisher’s work led me, page by page, into her world, and the stories were my connection to the living. They held onto me, like a thick rope tight around my wrist as I hovered in the depths of depression. They pulled me to food, into the kitchen to bake, cook, console, feed, feast, and connect back to who I was.
It was then, in that hungry and confused place, that I read this quote from George Santayana: “To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.” And when I began this book, less hungry, having tasted passions and discovered places in the world where I felt at home, I reread this same quote and knew these words were also mine.
M. F. K. Fisher’s book The Gastronomical Me titles eleven of its twenty-six chapters “The Measure of My Powers,” and I chose that as the title of my book, as an ode to her and how her words have fed me.
And like many of hers, my book is a collection of memories. I’ve written them as vignettes, short or long stories strung together with food. They are at times playful, at others painful, and like memories, they are sometimes seemingly unrelated and random. Though this is just the way we remember: while doing something mundane, like brushing our teeth or during our commute, non-sequential memories surface, at times taking us by surprise. But the memories we do keep form who we are when all put together like a puzzle, regardless of how unimportant and vague each one seems alone.
It was through writing that I was placed again in the depths of those moments I had tried so hard to forget. I found some parts flowed easily, but at other points I was obstinate, refusing to move until I gave myself the space to remember, to let go, to forgive others and myself before I could tell the story with any amount of clarity and grace. And with each chapter, I celebrated again my triumphs, relived my passions, and said goodbye once more. Slowly, word by word, my story and I were made whole again. In the end, I found that writing this book was more helpful to me than it could ever be to anyone else.
Even so, I share my stories, as honestly as I remember them, in the hopes that someone might read it on a day when it might be particularly helpful. Or that perhaps those who recognize my darkest moments may also find themselves in my triumphs, and be fed until their hungers are satisfied.
JKE
A NOTE ON THE NAMES AND CONVERSATIONS IN THIS BOOK
&nbs
p; I purposely chose not to share names, using only a single letter instead, for many people in this book, particularly for my former husband, G. The reason is that this story is mine and not theirs. The conversations and details are as accurate as I remember them, but as we all know, memories evolve and grow as we do, blue turns teal, and I know that for my entire future, I will only see richer facets of the past.
CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE
{2007}
THE JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND MILES begins with a SINGLE STEP.
Lao-Tzu
THESE WERE THE TWO MOMENTS IN MY DAY I DREADED—no, I think “feared” is a better word—most: the moment just before sleep and the precise moment I woke up. The unnerving silence of those times. There were no busy sounds to distract me, and nothing to occupy my mind. They were the moments I would be forced to face my own tangled and disfigured mind, even though I wanted desperately to look away.
At night I would lie awake sometimes until the dark sky lightened into paler shades of dawn. My insides crawled and vibrated, panic hijacking hours that, for others, were filled with easy rest. Even when I did find sleep, usually on the couch with the artificial noises of late-night TV lulling me, it was never for very long.
In the morning my chest would clench and yearn for unconsciousness. I kept my eyes closed and my body still, like a corpse, in hopes that my fragile sleep wouldn’t leave me completely. I tried to remember the last lingering image, any residue of a dream, wanting it to pull me back for another moment or two, but I was always out of luck and would quickly realize the effort was in vain. I hadn’t dreamt in months. In the past, my dreams had been wild and vivid: full of colors, conversations, places, the feel of fabric between my fingertips, or even the faces of people I had long forgotten. I would dream of a friend’s hazel eyes speckled with rust, or of the fine hairs at the back of their neck that formed a V. But these dreams had stopped, and so had sleep, with restlessness replacing both almost entirely. I was abandoned and forced to be alive for another day, so I would relent and slowly open my eyes to my dark, damp bedroom.
Inhale. Exhale.
“I can do this. Just get through today…and then after today…” I paused to imagine what came next. There was only a repeating image of a lifeless routine that made me feel nauseated.
“Tomorrow it starts all over again.” Dread filled me. I closed my eyes again, sinking into myself, wishing I could cry, but mostly, that ability had abandoned me too. “I have to do this over and over again, and again, and again,” I thought to myself, G sprawled to my left, the sheets, humid from his sweat, covering me like thick, cold skin.
“When does this end?” Inhale. Exhale.
Light was so unbearable to G that he had dark blinds installed on every window in our two-bedroom apartment. Greater than his dislike for light, though, was his loathing of materialism and superfluous “things.” So there was no artwork on the walls of our room, there weren’t any family photos or night tables for them to sit on, only a bed and a generic Swedish floor lamp in the corner. And every single morning, I awoke in this beige room, with bare beige walls and carpets that were an ever-so-slightly lighter shade of beige. I opened my eyes to nothing but emptiness in an empty room, numb with only the feeling of moist blankets cradling me.
I pleaded silently to God, to anything that might help me. “All I need is one thing, one thing to focus on, one thing that will help me get through today. Anything. Please.”
I scanned through my day for something that might give me relief. Waking up. Showering. Getting dressed. Driving to work. Saying good morning to coworkers. Starting a new design account. Meetings. Lunch…maybe.
I decided on one of the few things that still made me smile: “I’ll eat a chocolate chip cookie.”
I sat up and headed to the shower. I dressed myself in opaque black tights and a baggy tweed skirt suit I bought from a store I frequented that catered to affluent seniors. I tied my black hair in a tight bun at the nape of my neck and put on my wire-framed glasses and a pair of pearl earrings I had received as a wedding gift from an uncle. I was careful to look polished so no one would suspect that I was actually breaking apart, but I was also purposefully unobtrusive so as not to draw too much attention. I drove to work in my reliable silver sedan, and after lunch, I sat at a café table while I savored each sweet bite of my chocolate chip cookie, taking time to sip black coffee between each morsel. For those minutes, there was nothing else, no one to please, nothing to prove, just a cookie and me.
I
IN THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED, I FELT MYSELF BECOME more numb. There were muffled sounds of laughter and life bustling all around me, and yet it felt like I was submerged deep underwater, separated and hearing only the sound of my own breath and my heart slowly beating. I lived in this isolated world, sometimes comforted by the imaginary cocoon that solitude created, but mostly feeling anxious and restless for anything but the stillness. I was desperate to escape the feeling, and the longer it continued, the more I fantasized about a world where not only did I not exist, but where I had never existed at all.
The first time this thought had crossed my mind was about seven years earlier. I was lying in bed on a sunny afternoon, having come home during summer break from art college across the country with an overwhelming sense of pressure closing in on me. I didn’t understand it completely—I didn’t know why I felt it at all. Perhaps I could sense that I had disappointed my parents with the career I had chosen, but I also knew that I hadn’t been something that I was told I was supposed to be. I simply didn’t know how. Feeling like a helpless failure, I toyed with the idea of death. But I didn’t want to disappoint my family even more than I felt I had already, and I imagined that suicide would be shameful and burdensome for them. I wanted to be eliminated from their memories entirely.
I pulled and straightened the blanket over my head, hiding and imagining myself disappearing.
“How perfect would it be if I never existed? I could escape all of this,” I whispered, the sheets resting lightly on my face. They smelled musty and comforting, like my parents’ home.
Years later, these seemingly innocent daydreams were replaced with invasive, surprising, flickering images. Every time I crossed the street, changed lanes, or drove through an intersection, I would see Mack trucks demolishing me. As I soaked in the tub, the image of my dead body in a bath of blood would appear in my mind, along with scenes of G discovering it and then having to make agonizing calls to my family.
When I was a young adult, my younger cousin C killed herself. I overheard that when her parents had found her, in a basement room, there was blood everywhere. I caught a glimpse of the room later. The white linoleum floor was spotless, and I wondered who had cleaned it. Over the years following, I continued to see the devastating impact on the entire family. I saw the light die in my uncle’s eyes, never to return. I understood that C didn’t foresee the pain she would cause in her family’s life by ending her own, but the memory of that time and the knowledge that I would hurt those I loved if I chose to leave it were the only things holding me to life, like a leash.
But still, when the sadness was too paralyzing and all I could see and feel was my own incessant pain, I just wanted relief. “I think the best way is to take pills, painless and peaceful,” I journaled one evening. “But there is always the fear of waking up and things being worse, like brain damage, paralysis. Slitting my wrists is also an option, only because I hate the idea of suffocation. But that is messy (the blood, G would have to clean it up). Hanging: not pretty; they will have too much to regret when pulling me down. I heard C took painkillers. I heard there was blood, but she did it. She was decisive, resolute and spent time saying goodbye. I could too. I could write letters.”
I resolved to make a better plan, one where my family wouldn’t have to find my dead body or clean up some morbid mess. My plan also needed to be foolproof; they couldn’t be burdened by the consequences of the plan backfiring. And, though I figured it wouldn’t be more than
the pain I already felt, I didn’t want it to hurt a lot.
I began my research there and Googled “painless ways to kill yourself.” Diagrams, including medieval, gothic imagery flooded my screen. I clicked on a link for a forum topic: “Carbon monoxide is often not as effective as commonly believed.” I educated myself on how catalytic converters decreased the levels of poison in exhaust and the increasingly popular “death by hibachi.” But then I read a comment that made my body go cold.
“Don’t do it, it’s not worth it.”
It wasn’t the truth of the statement that caught me off-guard; it was the unexpectedly banal stereotype that snapped me into a different consciousness. It reminded me of all those movies where someone is trying to talk an unstable person off a building’s ledge. Then it dawned on me that, in this scenario, I was the one on the edge of the cliché, and it all seemed laughable and then incredibly frightening when contrasted to the reality of how close I was to killing myself. I had to tell G.
“I looked up ways to kill myself today. I don’t think that’s normal.”
“No. Maybe you should go talk to someone. I’m not sure I can help you.”
II
A WEEK OR TWO LATER, I WALKED INTO THE THERAPIST’S office for the first time, unsure of what I would find and trying my best to seem “normal” as I filled out an intake form, smiling widely at the receptionist and exaggerating my outer composure.
Shortly afterward, I was greeted by N, a petite, soft-spoken woman. She was elegantly dressed and her thick, dark hair and fair complexion created a striking drama. She led me down a carpeted hallway to her small office, furnished with a desk, a large armchair, and a leather loveseat that seemed to slump into an overly relaxed shape.
“Sit wherever you feel most comfortable, Jackie,” she said to me. It sounded rehearsed, and I realized there were people with preferences for where they sat in a room, a concept strange to me as I was accustomed to sitting wherever there was an empty spot.
The Measure of My Powers: A Memoir of Food, Misery, and Paris Page 1
