New Books

Laurie writes absorbing memoir

Learning to Live Out Loud: A Memoir
By Piper Laurie
(Crown Archetype)

Rosetta Jacobs was a bright and thoughtful child but struggled to express herself. Only after she was a teenager and theater marquees began carrying her new name — Piper Laurie — did the quiet girl from Detroit begin to find the strength to speak up.

It would take time and heartache for her to reach a full-throated freedom.

“Learning to Live Out Loud” is Laurie‘s absorbing memoir about that personal transition as well as her professional development from a popular star of grade B entertainments to an Oscar-nominated actress (“The Hustler,” “Carrie” and “Children of a Lesser God”) who also had memorable roles on television and the stage.

She was born in 1932 to first-generation American Jews — her mother’s parents had emigrated from Russia, her father’s from Poland. They accepted their youngest daughter’s relative silence — she now believes she suffered from acute anxiety disorder — without much question.

Laurie would find her voice through the make-believe world of acting. But she wanted to say something meaningful, too. Her career as a Universal contract player in movies like 1951’s “The Prince Who Was a Thief” turned out to be profitable but hardly challenging.

Rebelling against her image as a “perky starlet,” she tore up her contract in spite of an uncertain future. TV dramas of the 1950s sharpened her talents, yet acclaimed turns in the live TV play “The Days of Wine and Roses” in 1958 and the 1961 movie “The Hustler” with Paul Newman didn’t result in more top roles.

Laurie left movies for 15 years. Living in upstate New York, she grew personally as a wife, a mother and an artist. Her return to the screen as Sissy Spacek’s mother in 1976’s “Carrie” heralded a new phase in her career that would include the cult TV series “Twin Peaks” (1990-1991).

Gregory Peck, her co-star in “Other People’s Money” in 1991, described one of Laurie’s performances as “a series of revelations moving and true.” That could be said of “Learning to Live Out Loud.” In a voice that is simple and straightforward, she looks back in joy and amusement, in anger and disappointment, and with tinges of regret.

Laurie achieves what eludes many performers when they write about their outsize lives: a gripping but intimate story that never loses touch with the complexities of life that challenge all of us. (AP)


Food culture’s origins

The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food
By Adam Gopnik
(Alfred A. Knopf) by Adam Gopnik

One needn’t venture very far into Adam Gopnik’s new book, “The Table Comes First,” before beginning to wonder whether with all the recent books, TV shows and movies devoted to food and eating there remains anything more to be said on the subject.

With foodie culture encompassing everything from locavores, who eat only locally grown foods, and the slow food movement to Ferran Adria’s “techno-emotional” cooking and molecular gastronomy, it seems there was never a time when society has been more obsessed by food.

Gopnik, however, points out that it only seems that way. Man’s obsession with food is as old as civilization itself, or as he succinctly puts it: “An animal that eats and thinks must think big about what it is eating not to be taken for an animal.”

So Gopnik’s book finds its niche as a sort of intellectual history of eating, beginning at the table with its rituals and tracing them all the way back to Paris of the 1750s where the restaurant was born and where he explains, “the idea of eclectic eating in big cities began.”

“The Table Comes First” lays the theory on pretty thick, with Gopnik citing everyone from the pioneering gastronomic writers Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and Alexandre Grimod de La Reyniere to American economists Gary Becker and Thorstein Veblen throwing in choice snippets from Scottish philosopher David Hume and Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards among others along the way.

Then just as readers may fear they are in over their heads, Gopnik leavens the proceedings with personal anecdotes and a few recipes of his own.

Throughout the book, Gopnik also carries on an imaginary correspondence with Elizabeth Pennell (1862-1952), a Philadelphia writer, food critic and cookbook collector whose views on food at the beginning of the last century seem especially prescient today.

The book serves as an exhaustive overview of the current state of foodie culture in America and its historical antecedents but eventually peters out into a kind of hodgepodge cobbled together from articles Gopnik has written about chefs and food over the years for The New Yorker.

Near the end of the book, we find Gopnik in Spain eating a comically complicated dessert, one which tries to emulate the emotions of a soccer goal, complete with the smell of grass and a contraption that flips over like a spring sending a white-chocolate soccer ball into the air, high above a white candy netting.

It’s a fitting ending for a book that crams in lots of delicious morsels but is perhaps too rich. Suffering from too many themes, it ends up resembling an extravagant smorgasbord. (AP)