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Apron Anxiety: My Messy Affairs In And Out Of The Kitchen (2012)

by Alyssa Shelasky(Favorite Author)

3.36 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0307952142 (ISBN13: 9780307952141)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Three Rivers Press

review 1: My Summary: Apron Anxiety is the memoir of a young, pretty, popular and privileged “it” city girl Alyssa Shelasky and her complicated love affair a celebrity chef that introduces her to the kitchen and food appreciation. Expect the tone to be chick lit, with a wry New York humor to it. Essentially, the book is about her being able to find some center through food that grounds her previously flighty social life and her self-identity as she documents her time back and forth in New York City, Washington DC, and LA. She does “dish” a lot- lots of name dropping in all three cities of celebrities, and although she is vague on who her love, “Chef” is, you can google and find the answer pretty easily though I don’t think knowing his name is essential to the story. Bu... moret, I know you will totally look it up.My Humble Opinion: If you are hoping for a lot of stories about how she conquers the kitchen, you won’t see them here- not the way you are told tales by Julie & Julia–My Year of Cooking Dangerously by Julie Powell. Alyssa only shares a few- though the few stories she does share (mac and cheese, banana bread loaves, and cherry pie) are great. I and probably everyone has major oops like that in a dish which still end up being served and eaten hoping no one will notice the screw-ups.Overall, I thought it was an interesting take on the opposite side of what was Cooking for Mr. Latte by Amanda Hesser where she was the foodie trying to educate her man, but this time Alyssa is the one who knows nothing about food. Both books pair sharing recipes with personal stories of how that recipe fit in with her life.As you would expect, all three of these books (Julie and Alyssa’s books both come from their blogs, Amanda’s from her column) are self-indulgent, and there were times I had to put each of them down to give myself a break from being irritated. This was particularly the case with Alyssa.You have to get through the first few chapters, before cooking gets into the tale, to get to the good part of the story. Apron Anxiety first few chapters were especially hard to get through (I did resort to skimming, and maybe put it down a couple times distracted or annoyed). For page and pages, she talks about essentially and incessantly being a popular fun girl in high school and all the partying she does in her 20s as a gossip and celebrity writer, being paid to essentially live it up on the edge of celebrity world and write about it.That is, until she gets whisked away to Greece after 3 months of dating Chef and drops her life to follow him. Then for the next 9 months makes no friends and doesn’t work. She writes in these chapters essentially of shutting that social life/career down to be celebrity-supported eye candy that waits for him to get home in order to make sandwiches or cereal- she doesn’t even clean because they have a weekly housekeeper.It’s amazing in that it seems she is able to paid/supported to be living it up not through any moment of hard work (just existing and dealing with the world already seems to be hard work for her), but mostly courtesy seemingly of her looks, the luck of being well-connected with influential people, wit and charm. Fortunately, these latter two characteristics spills over into the voice in her writing. Reading the book’s first few chapters you may want to skip it, but at least skim it – it does help establish a baseline of how crazy she was and how low she goes before food and cooking saves her.Apron Anxiety at least has the bonus that Alyssa can write well, turning phrases such as “As I cope with the collapse of us, Zagat is my Zoloft” which keeps you reading for how she might describe something dramatically next. She also has a knack for writing honestly and openly like a girl friend in your early-mid 20s talking all night at a sleepover after you’ve opened your third bottle of wine and are getting into the “confessional/emotional truths” part of the late night. Example: her admitting that rather than dining out a lot because she loves exploring, she is using lists of Best Bloody Mary or Favorite Fish Taco “as arrows, as I have no idea what else to do with myself, or where I belong”.Come on, I know you know what part of the night I am talking about. This whole book is basically Alyssa and you having that part of the night- with only Alyssa doing the talking.She does a pretty good job of capturing the ups of the relationship with chef (that she dubs “relationchef”) which they just watch reality shows and toasted cheese sandwiches when he is around, and the disappointment and hurt of being second after his push for his career and fame because most of the time, he is not around. I think every woman can relate to at one point, putting herself second to a man, and defining herself by trying to live in his world- it’s an easy mistake of youth that in using society as a mirror, when that first intense love comes along he becomes the entire mirror.The kitchen and food are what pull Alyssa up finally from her way too dependent life she was existing in for almost a 9 months since moving to DC. Great… but seriously, it took her the amount of time that other women might have a baby to figure out she needed to do something with herself instead of waiting for him to come home from work.She talks about how she is lonely in DC, but you are told early on about all the people she knows that she leaves behind when she moves, but yet are told not much at the same time. We are mostly told rather than shown friends and family. Their personality is summarized by her in a few sentences, and then it boils down to what they are doing for/to her. I think that is probably understandable in a blog entry, but in a book, her feeling abandoned is an important theme of the story. Yet being told about her amazingly awesome her close friends are for a page or two and then they disappear so long I started forgetting/mixing them up until they appear again to help her out. It is a fracture in the narrative.At the same time, she is quickly judgmental, dismissing her neighbors when she moves to a new city as too ordinary and all possible friends in DC as profoundly conservative or crazy (she does eventually take back the neighbors judgement, calling it one of the dumbest moves of her life).For me, that makes it difficult to build a lot of empathy for her as I was reading the book as it presents her as a character who seems so self-centered as she wrings her hands about how she’s frustrated and sad and alone, but then her friends seem to do her giant, selfless favors and provide access to elite connections and opportunities. She even describes herself at one point as “I am the stray who C Street has taken in”, and when hearing a real tragic situation, feels ashamed for “whining about my utterly pathetic bubblegum BS” but then returns to it a few pages later. I kept wondering how long this quarter life crisis was going to go on- and she was having it in her late 20s/early 30s.It wasn’t until I thought about how I just read Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking that I began thinking of her in another perspective- someone who keeps really going to the extreme ends of the scale of an extrovert needing the energy of others to feed from- which certainly seems to explain why she fades so much in being alone and is not very introspective. Yet, she seems to also have an awkwardness like an introvert where she just wants to stay inside from the world. Making that connection helped me see this book at an interesting level.The only way she seems to be able to give to others is through food, once she begins- which is already 1/3 of the book in. In Alyssa’s case, you follow along to see how cooking and food becomes an outlet for her to take the edge off, and is way for her to provide for those she cares about. She doesn’t spend much time talking about the flavors of food as much as the process and care of cooking, and the enjoyment she sees when her friends are taken care of by the food. Food tells a story, or evokes emotions for her. Because of this, even when she is alone, she can find energy through food. This seems to be the prime intent of the book, and a fine subject to explore. The way she writes it though, there’s just a lot more of her than writing about food.She is a maddening mess of totally un-relatable and relatable.In visiting a lot of dodgy dive-y cheap hole in the walls, she writes “Our bills are always under thirty bucks; I am always too scared to use the bathroom”", but also admits that he opens her eyes to secret gems. After ducking out of a NY food industry party and changing out of her Louboutins, she walks through the streets of the Village “looking for fresh air and maybe a falafel”. For the first time she attempts a home-cooked meal, she writes a list in a fuchsia Sharpie, spends $200 and takes multiple selfies to text to Chef, and describes the drive with feeling “pretty cool pretending to be a home cook, with my important grocery list and Made In Brooklyn bag. The car windows are down, the National is playing, and my long, layered hair is pinned up just right. I look good in foodie.”I can’t help but sometimes roll my eyes as she writes that her wishlist changed from Lanvin flats ($500-$900) to pizza stones and spoontulas or mentions she is walking into an event where her first Herve Leger bandage dress. But then I’m lured back into continuing to read as I laugh at how goofy and self depreciating she can be as she admits into walking into a glass door, undershooting the distance between a car and a wall, or thinking about Madonna as she targets her upper arm muscles while whisking. She also talks about cheese many times.Basically, how much you will enjoy of this book depends on your ability to enjoy the obnoxious but also fun, emotional somewhat drunk evening with Alyssa.
review 2: An interesting book that drew me in right away. The author almost set her apartment on fire when she tries to boil water on the stove using a plastic carafe. Which scared her away from cooking for a number of years. Even when she moved out to LA and became a wild child. For eight months she allowed her inhibitions to rest while she did whatever she felt.It took me a little bit of time to warm up to Alyssa. She's an unrepentant party girl (by her own admission) who doesn't cook. But she starts branching out after she stalks (and lands) an almost-celebrity chef.This is not really a book about cooking (although I am saving the recipes because They Look Fabulous!) a la "Julie and Julia." Instead of being the focus, cooking is rather incidental. The recipes are metaphors for what is going on in the author's world while her increasing prowess in the kitchen mirrors her own emotional growth. I wouldn't have kept reading this book normally but am glad I stuck it out as it was one I really enjoyed. less

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