Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites Hardback - 2013

Media reviews

Praise for Blue Plate Special:

“I’ve often thought that eating, writing and living well required similar qualities: creativity, daring, the ability to savor the good stuff and learn from the bad. Blue Plate Special is the memoir of an utterly original thinker, a free-spirited gourmand, and a great American writer. It’s an expert guide on inspiration, ingenuity, heartbreak, buoyancy, home, love, family, screwing up, bouncing back and perfecting the bacon-cheddar biscuit.”
—Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl, Dark Places, and Sharp Objects

“Blue Plate Special is the evocative, irresistible tale of the life and loves of one of America’s greatest writers, Kate Christensen. Her loves include: Family, friends, men, travel, literature, but perhaps most of all, food. This is a breathtaking book, sensuously written, emotionally generous, and decadent as a bowl of macaroni and cheese.”
—Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins

“No American author writes with greater generosity of spirit or blazing descriptive power than Kate Christensen. Blue Plate Special is a marvel of a memoir—warm, wise, earthy, funny, honest, haunting, and bighearted. Christensen takes her place among the other great writers who’ve shown us that the best writing about food must also be about life and love and the world that grants us these gifts. If you’re crazy about M.F.K Fisher and Laurie Colwin, you will be crazy for this book, too. There's not a single empty calorie here: every morsel is both delicious and nourishing.”
— Rosie Schaap, author of Drinking With Men
 
“Kate Christensen’s prose has always been dazzling and brilliant even as it amuses and entertains. In Blue Plate Special, she applies her formidable talent to a memoir about the role of food in her (not always easy or kosher) past and present. The result is a glorious feast of meals, prose, and life from one of our finest writers today—a banquet of a book about eating, loving, and overcoming, to be devoured as fast as one’s fingers can turn the pages.”
— Cathi Hanauer, author of Gone and Sweet Ruin, and editor of The Bitch in the House  

“A novelist’s deliciously engrossing exploration of her life through the two major passions that have defined it: food and writing…A Rabelaisian celebration of appetite, complete with savory recipes, that genuinely satisfies.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Christensen writes with savory, home-cooked clarity as she digs deeply into the pleasures and dangers of food, charting the culinary fads of the 1960s on as well as changes to women’s lives while zestfully telling intimate, harrowing, and hilarious tales of appetites corrosive and nourishing.”
— Booklist

“Christensen…brings a real sense of enchantment to her food writing…She is both sensual and wickedly observant, a hard combination to pull off.”
— NPR

“In the end, Christensen makes no grand pronouncements, offers no advice, reveals no starry epiphany. There is, simply, life, and its small pleasures, and maybe, with time, a little bit of peacemaking with the company of memory, over plates of asparagus and steamed-and-buttered clams, small glasses of Rioja and chocolate-dipped strawberries, and out of it all a generosity of spirit…”
— Salon.com

“In Blue Plate Special, Christensen has deftly tucked food into every scenario, every relationship and every crossroads. But it isn’t her subject. Eating is what she was doing while she was growing up, falling in love and becoming a writer. She recounts all of this very well, creating a homey and vivid portrait of a woman who has dedicated herself to sitting in a room—sometimes of her own—and writing good books, including this one.”
— The Wall Street Journal

“A mouthwateringly good story that begs to be read and shared. “
— Bookpage

“After publishing six novels, Christensen (The Great Man) turned her literary attention to food—first in a blog and now in this poignant, delicious first memoir…A delightful book that leaves you hungering for more.”
— People Magazine

“How many more food-based memoirs does the reading public really need? Novelist Kate Christensen proves that there’s always room for one more, provided that it’s good and this one is…There’s plenty of food (and no shortage of alcohol) in these pages, counterbalanced with some really fine prose.”
— The Christian Science Monitor

“Picking up Blue Plate Special is a little like having Kate Christensen sit down next to you in a bar and hearing her life story. In a bar, you wouldn’t get her recipes, however. They appear in the book and are built for comfort, from the Bachelorette Puttanesca to the Dark Night of the Soul Soup.”
— Los Angeles Times