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Books of the Times
Voracious Love Affair and Battle With Pleasures and Snares of Food
BORN ROUND
The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater
By Frank Bruni
Illustrated. 352 pages. Penguin Press. $25.95.
Frank
Bruni’s early relationship with food did not bode well. As a toddler,
still in diapers, he was such an avid eater that two large hamburgers
could not satisfy him; even worse, if he was denied a third burger, he
protested by vomiting the first two. If he was rationed to a
more-than-reasonable three cookies,
he would beg his mother for a fourth and vomit if he was shot down. He
was an equal-opportunity glutton, as insatiably enthusiastic about his
grandmother’s marvelous-sounding frits — crackling chunks of fried
dough, used to shovel up drifts of sugar — as he was about the lowliest
of supermarket cookies.
If “Born Round,” Mr. Bruni’s new memoir,
just detailed his obsessive eating, his serial bouts of bulimia, the
barometric rise and fall of his pants size, his frequent episodes of
self-loathing punctuated by midnight snacks of enough roast chicken to
feed a family, it would be an unexceptional book; after all, confession
culture, and particularly food- and diet-related confession, has been
popular for 20 years and pretty tedious for about 19.
But Mr.
Bruni’s book is distinctive and intriguing on several accounts. The
author is male (most diet memoirs are written by, and for, women); he
writes well and insightfully (rare in this often sloppy genre); and in
spite of his problems with food, he has spent the last five years as
perhaps the most influential eater in America: the restaurant critic of
The New York Times.
Mr. Bruni comes by his appetite honestly. One
of four children in a lively, comfortably affluent suburban New York
family, he is stuffed from the start by his Italian grandmother, then
by his mother, a WASP from more of a baloney-sandwich background who
nonetheless adopts her mother-in-law’s mania for enormous, red-sauce
meals. Mrs. Bruni cooks “with a ferocity” while fortifying herself with
gallons of Tab. She is also a mad dieter, nibbling her way through
Atkins, Jenny Craig, the grapefruit diet and then back again, all while
cooking platters of beef stroganoff or lasagna for 80.
Both
extremes — the overabundance and the dieting — seem to preoccupy her.
Did she ever look up and notice that little Frank was husky? That he
would suction off every scrap of flesh from a lamb chop and then grab a
third helping of rice? Apparently she did, and while she never seemed
to realize how serious his compulsion was, she did suggest that he try
to slim down, and they began a series of mother-son diets that never
worked, except to make them the best of friends.
The Bruni
children are achievers, good in school and good at sports; even Frank,
the house klutz, discovers a great talent for competitive swimming, and
though he is miserable in his second-skin Speedo, he excels. As with
eating, he swims immoderately. He is like an engine without a governor,
not feeling the food that he’s eating, not feeling the resistance of
the water as he races in record time.
What he does feel, though,
is exquisite self-consciousness about his body, a preoccupation so
constant that it deforms his life. His friendships and later his
romances hinge on whether he can bear to have anyone see him for who he
is: a binge eater with a closet full of clothes that he refuses to
believe don’t fit.
When Mr. Bruni details his bulimia in college,
his fumbling efforts at relationships, his late-night gorging (so
unappetizing that you will never eat Nutter Butters again), he is at
his best; the plain honesty he conveys is painful and endearing, and
his modesty is at times astonishing. He is a nationally ranked
competitive swimmer! A Morehead scholar at the University of North Carolina! A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize! A best-selling author!
Mr.
Bruni passes over these accomplishments lightly, focusing instead on
his mortification at being weighed at his doctor’s office, at being
seen without the baggy jacket that he believes camouflages his
waistline, at having his younger brother finally tell him flat out that
he is fat. He comes across as so likable, so ingenuous, that you really
do find yourself rooting for him.
In that sense, the book becomes
something of a suspense story. Will he keep the weight off? Will he
call the cute guy who asks for his phone number, rather than deciding
that he can’t bear to have the guy realize how heavy he is? The book
ends with Mr. Bruni’s seeming to master his problem — it’s all about
portions — but the final sentence, suggesting that he has learned to
stop shoveling in food “at least for now,” leaves the reader hanging,
and hoping that he won’t let himself go.
Surprisingly, the
weakest part of the book is the section that seems as if it would be
the most engaging: the story of Mr. Bruni’s tenure as the Times
restaurant critic. He spends too much time detailing the shenanigans
required to keep his identity secret. It’s familiar stuff and comes off
as a little silly, even if you can appreciate why it’s important for a
restaurant critic to be anonymous: fortunes really are made or lost in
the food world on an important critic’s appraisal. The section drags
on, and the theme that threads the book together, the story of his
pitched battle with food, gets lost amid the anecdotes about his fake
mustaches and assumed names.
Mr. Bruni’s insights into why he
overloads on food — that eating won him attention from his grandmother
and mother, that it’s partly genetic, that it provides him with
something to blame for anything in life that doesn’t go his way — are
not new, but they are so well put and genuinely felt that they seem
fresh. When he finally approaches near-slimness, he writes that his
behavior and elation “were those of someone living in a country he
never thought he’d see, with privileges he never thought he’d have.”
It’s
a perfect description of how consuming, literally and figuratively,
body image is, and how long and lonely and endless the journey to that
country — what he calls “the far side of fatness” — can be.