Kate Christensen

This memoir made for both good reading and incredibly hard reading at the same time. The reason for this, I suspect, is that I might be too similar to the author and relate a little too much to her failing, her self-loathing, her struggle to find confidence in herself. This is an extremely honest memoir, and it makes for hard reading in the same way that looking in the mirror and acknowledging one's own faults is a hard thing to do. On the brighter side, like the author, I also love food and show more the descriptions of food here are amazing. Also, there are recipes! I actually tried the "Dark Night of the Soul" soup and it was wonderful. A good read, but know what you're getting yourself into before starting this one. show less

Kate Christensen is a seriously accomplished novelist with a Pen/Faulkner award in her pocket (The Great Man, 2008). But she's also written a well-received food–related memoir called Blue Plate Special, and in How To Cook A Moose she returns to that genre. That is nothing but a good thing. How To Cook A Moose is the sexy, witty and charming chronicle of Christensen's move to and ongoing familiarization with Portland, Maine and environs. Her focus is obviously on the gastronomic, and show more there's a lot to like about that (including mouth-watering recipes), but what made it even more engaging for me was how she used those culinary insights as a jumping-off point for beguiling musings on life and love. show less

Rachel last saw her hometown, Portland, Maine, a decade ago, but now that her mother has died, she's back. Now fifty, she hopes menopause means that the hormones that helped her make some regrettable choices are no longer in play, giving her (she hopes) a new, hard-fought-for clarity.
She plans to do what needs to be done and then return to Washington DC and her journalism career with her sanity and dignity intact. Of course that doesn't happen.

This novel is about the pleasures and show more impossibility of going home in middle age, especially when your adult life has been defined in being as far from that place as possible. Rachel and her sister had a difficult childhood, their widowed mother hard at work staying young and wild, money always being short. And her relationship with her sister fractured for reasons Rachel doesn't know. Returning is hard, and when it turns out that she may be staying awhile, her ability to justify her own decisions and actions become less tenable by the day.

Christensen writes well and it's unusual to find menopause handled as more than a complaint or a punchline. Rachel may be fifty, but she's a Pulitzer-winning journalist and her high school boyfriend keeps turning up like a recurring heat rash. She's an aging woman who is still an active participant in her own life. She manages to hide her own responsibility behind the language of therapy and her judgements of others change depending on her last encounter with them. She's far too complex to be an entirely sympathetic character, but the way she keeps trying to figure things out is always interesting. show less

I'd grown up without being exposed to many actual men besides teachers, who didn't really count. I had cobbled together a composite picture for myself out of the limited source material at hand. My mother had naturally weighed in heavily with the opinion that the male sex was a lower order without common sense or the capacity to behave responsibly, but Gothic novels and fairy tales had inculcated in me the equally strong but contrary expectation that either a prince of some kind would carry show more me off to his castle or Mr. Rochester would eventually marry me if I waited for him to go blind. By the time I was eight years old, I'd absorbed the idea that courtship and marriage happened when the perfect man came along and chose you from the lineup.

Claudia's not doing great. Almost thirty and her fabulous New York life means living in a terrible studio apartment she can't even afford, ghost-writing for a confused and abusive socialite while also working as her personal assistant, in love with her best friend, who has never given her the slightest encouragement and drinking far more than would be a good idea for a stevedore. This is Kate Christensen's first novel. It was published in 1999 and is very much a snapshot of a specific time, and it's also witty and funny in a we're-all-drowning-so-let's-have-a-laugh kind of way.

I really love this kind of novel, where a woman gets herself into a mess of her own making and her attempts to right things either works or goes disastrously wrong. Claudia was a wreck, but she was so funny in a Dorothy Parker kind of way and the author has taken the time to give her and the secondary characters real depth. I highly recommend this book for readers who like this kind of thing. show less