It’s very likely that you know chef and author Gabrielle Hamilton for one of two things: her iconic Manhattan restaurant Prune (RIP), or her soaring and fearless 2012 debut memoir, Blood, Bones Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, which told the story of her less-than-conventional upbringing in a converted silk mill in rural Pennsylvania and her rise to the top of the New York culinary scene.
In her latest memoir, Next of Kin, Hamilton takes a different tack, recounting—among other things—the deaths of two of her brothers, a brutal falling-out with her sister, her complex relationship with her father, and the confusing peace of coming to care for her once-feared, now-elderly mother. Hamilton’s voice is as singular and rollicking as ever in Next of Kin, but it feels rare and special to have it applied to the kind of complicated family history that so many of us only come to confront in adulthood (if at all).
This week, Vogue spoke to Hamilton about moving away from food writing; her daily routine as a wife, dog owner, and empty-nester; challenging conventional wisdoms around writing about family; and letting “the light show up at the end” of a dark revision process.
Vogue: How does it feel to release a project that’s not as food-centric as your previous ones?
Gabrielle Hamilton: I feel good about it. It was kind of an experiment for myself, or a sort of quiet and nagging question in my own mind that I’ve been thinking about for some time: “Are you a writer, Gabrielle, or are you a food writer?” Not just a food writer—but I wanted to know if I could write a book that didn’t have food or recipes in it, and the jury’s out. I mean, I’ve done it, but we’ll see! In all the food writing I’ve ever done, the real stories are always sort of lurking underneath or knocking on the walls of the room, so finally, it was like, “Let’s just get the food out of here and get to the real story.”
What does life look like for you these days with the book newly out?
Well, as you know, book publishing has changed tremendously since the last time I did it, so you don’t really go on tour very much—it’s too expensive for the publisher. So you do a lot of podcasting. I think the plan is to have conversations like that. And then I teach writing at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia every fall, so that’s on my schedule right now. I run Prune as a kind of restaurant-by-appointment, so that’s my life: empty nest, two college-aged kids, and my cherished, beloved wife and my usually-cherished dog. Sometimes I get annoyed at the dog, but that’s the package over here.
What would you say was the biggest difference in the writing process for Next of Kin versus Blood, Bones and Butter?
I couldn’t find the story in Next of Kin. I found the propulsive, driving narrative thrust very difficult to find, even though I knew there was a very compelling story there, and even though there was a ton of evidence and vignette and material. The hardest part was just asking myself, you know, where’s this train headed? Let’s put this train on the track and get it going in the right direction—what station are we headed toward? It took me a very long time to find that, because the material is so minute and subtle and nuanced that it reminded me, metaphorically speaking, of when you’re trying to detect an invisible or silent virus and you have to put every slide under the microscope and examine it. You finally see—oh, there’s the virus—but it’s not this big, explosive, sharply defined thing, if that makes sense.
Do you feel like you learned new things about your family in the writing of Next of Kin?
I think I couldn’t figure out what was going on in my family for the longest time, because we had so much, and everything was so fine and so beautiful and so mesmerizing, and we share so many characteristics that people admire and aspire to. My parents in particular, but my siblings also. Even though I understood there were these very dark, quite painful and excruciating things, I couldn’t quite register them for the longest time. And even with the first death of a brother, it didn’t hit. But, you know, after a suicide death, and then a real examination of my own despicable behavior, I was like, What the fuck is going on? So then I was able to take a more nuanced and neutral look, and I would say in early drafts of the work I was still prosecuting, litigating, trying to find someone to lay it all at their feet—and I couldn’t. It’s just not there. I ended up actually, weirdly, just loving the shit out of everyone as much as I always had.
Sorry for this very woo LA question, but how did you take care of yourself while delving into some of this very dark material?
I think that’s a great question—it’s not woo—but it honestly didn’t occur to me. I am pretty scrappy, and I think I’m as tender as the next guy, but I also have a certain ruggedness or bravery to make up for it or something… I think you call it muscle. You just muscle through and revisit and revisit and revisit some very dark stuff, and the light shows up at the end.
How do you feel, generally speaking, about the concept of healing through memoir?
I think because I have studied the craft of writing my whole life, from a very young age, the way that I understand the work—whether it’s memoir or not—is that it’s work. Yeah. The healing is not for me, it’s for the reader. I grew up studying this work and how it gets done, so the way that I’ve always understood catharsis, at least, isn’t the kind of Aristotelian model where I’m going to write the play about war, and you’re going to come see the play about war, and you’re going to have your catharsis. I’m working, so it’s not cathartic or healing in that way for me, but it is very organizing and soothing and relieving to put what had been chaotic in one’s mind into the pretty sturdy architecture of a book.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
