Memoirist Marries Food and Writing
in Blood Bones & Butter

An an exclusive Authorlink interview
with Chef Gabrielle Hamilton

By Ellen Birkett Morris
April 2012

For Chef Gabrielle Hamilton, owner of Prune restaurant in New York’s East Village, cooking and writing have always been dual passions.

Since the age of twelve she has worked in restaurant kitchens working her way through the usual stations, dishwashing, peeling potatoes, making salads and working the line. Given the rigors of this kind of work, the time Hamilton took to pursue an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan felt like “an incredible sabbatical.”

The two disciplines fed each other. As her fame rose as a chef, Hamilton honed her writing as a contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, Bon Appétit, Saveur, and Food & Wine.

Last year, she married the world of food and writing with the publication of her memoir “Blood, Bones & Butter.”

“My training in the hospitality industry has been a great help. I think of my reader as a guest in my restaurant. I make sure they have what they need to get my story,” said Hamilton.

Her memoir took a while to come together. She first sold the book idea to Penguin Press in 2005.

“I understood that I got the contract because I was a chef in a world that is obsessed with food and I was glad to ride that train. I understood that I had to write about people, places and events as they related to food.”

When the book didn’t come together she gave back her advance.

“I was humiliated. There is very little that I don’t fully deliver on once I commit. When I failed with the first contract I had a two small children and the restaurant was booming,” said Hamilton.

In December 2008, she signed a new contract to write the book for Random House.

Hamilton said that magazine and book length writing couldn’t be more different. “I found that the word count and deadline in magazine writing acts as muse and editor simultaneously,” said Hamilton.

Her major shift in the creation of the book came when she “stopped looking for an authority figure, teacher, professor, editor, mommy, to validate what I was writing.”

She wrote whenever she had a spare minute between the six and eight o’clock dinner rush at the restaurant, in the car while in traffic and in bed with her children on either side. Hamilton said many of the stories she had told over and over about herself that she thought would be in the book didn’t make the cut because they fell flat on the page.

“They were dead because they were untrue. They rendered me the way I wanted to be rendered. When I got to the truth of them they were really sad, not funny like I had told them,” said Hamilton.

The book is full of gritty, evocative stories that pull back the curtain on what many consider a glamorous business.

Her biggest challenge, according to Hamilton, was “maintaining a voice I could bear to listen to for 300 pages.”

She said her friend Canadian screenwriter David Young advised her to use “the voice that is you, speaking to the smartest person you know about everything you hate about the subject, with as much compassion as you can muster.”

The book came together section by section in a nonlinear fashion. Hamilton wrote the section about the opening of the restaurant, which shows up in the middle of the book, last. She worked with Editor Pamela Cannon to shape the final manuscript. Reading aloud proved to be a good tool to make sure the book was flowing and remained interesting.

“I was blindsided by the amount of reading I had to do of my own material.”

Hamilton said she was approached by agents when she first opeI was blindsided by the amount of reading I had to do of my own material.ned Prune in 1999 but declined their offers of representation until her restaurant had been open a while and she had done some food writing for the New Yorker and The New York Times. Her agent Kim Witherspoon, who Hamilton calls “fiercely loyal”, came into her life at a time when she was ready to begin thinking about writing a book.

When it comes to the writing life, Hamilton advises, “Don’t get caught up in the idea of being something rather than doing it.”

Hamilton plans to follow her popular memoir with a cookbook. “I learned a lot and toned up my writing muscle. I’m not ready to do a novel, but I have to do some more writing. It feels delicious to focus on recipes and cooking.”