Frank Bruni on Consuming Fusilli and Content

During his five years as the New York Times restaurant critic, Frank Bruni was the most well-known and religiously followed food writer in New York City and, possibly, the country. Most readers were also probably familiar with his previous work as a Times reporter in D.C., his coverage of George Bush's 2000 presidential campaign, and his features in the Sunday Magazine. But one detail most didn't know was that he had serious struggles with his weight. Bruni writes about this in Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater (Penguin Press). BTW recently spoke with him about his memoir and what he thinks, as an author (Ambling into History, HarperCollins; A Gospel of Shame, Viking) and a journalist, of the changing ways information is perceived.

With any restaurant critic or chef, you would expect to find an early interest in food. But Bruni went way beyond this. He consumed massive quantities of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, homemade pasta, frits (fried dough). And if he didn't get a third helping "up came the remnants" of the first and second. At Halloween, he was always "furtively shuttling some of the contents of a sibling's trick-or-treat bag" into his own.

When he hit his early twenties, Bruni, not unpredictably, went from being an involuntary "baby bulimic" to a fully intentioned adult one. Constant attempts to hide his weight made dates awkward when he would refuse to take off his coat. He tried an early Atkins diet and when that didn't work, Mexican speed. But when Bruni became the Times lead correspondent for Bush's 2000 presidential campaign, he hit NFL-linebacker weight, thanks, in part, to the seven fatty, carbohydrate-laden meals provided each day by the campaign to keep reporters fed and happy. Bruni topped out at 268 pounds, and the coat stayed on.

It was pretty ironic, then, that the Times offered him the restaurant gig. The subtitle of his memoir, "The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater," points to how much he kept his eating issues to himself. Bruni has long been openly gay and it was never news, but revealing that he had such psychological issues with food seems a far more personal coming out. For his book, however, anything other than full disclosure wasn't an option.

"I feel very, very strongly that if you're going to write a memoir, and you're going to ask someone to spend money and time on your life, then you can't pretty it up and deny them full candor," he told BTW. As a journalist who has written about David Foster Wallace, Vanessa Redgrave, and others, Bruni noted that the best profiles require honesty and facts. "In telling your own story you have access to the most details and candor, and it is incumbent on you to go there and use that."

While he is, of course, serious about his work, writing Born Round was "more fun than chore," he said, although he acknowledged the difficulty of completing a book. "Writing a book is the writer's equivalent of running a marathon. You have to stick with it for a while because it takes a lot of patience."

In his memoir, Bruni reveals how he learned patience -- as a teenager on an Outward Bound-like trip. He had had enough of hiking with a 50-pound pack and camping in sub-freezing temperatures, and he wanted out. The trip leader told him, "There are some things you enjoy doing, and there are other things you enjoy having done. And that second kind of enjoyment lasts longer." Bruni said he still sometimes counts on this as motivation to get up from his desk and go running, something he had to do a lot of while eating the thousands of calories required for his job.

During his tenure as the Times bureau chief in Rome, between 2002 and 2004, Bruni figured out how to apply that discipline to food, and by the time he became the restaurant critic had his eating under control. He did have second thoughts about exposing himself to that epic temptation, however. For Bruni, staying thin boiled down to exercise and portion control. He often tasted just a few bites of the many dishes he had to sample as a restaurant critic. "It was an enforced grazing. It was fantastic because you get to really sample of lot of flavors and ideas at a restaurant."

Restaurant-going these days is far less demanding (although he's still in the habit of beginning to compose the review in his head). He no longer has to eat his way through as much of the menu as possible. "Now I dwell on an appetizer and entre instead of trying it all," Bruni said. "It can be as much fun to kind of hunker down on one thing that catches your eye."

Some dishes worth concentrating on are the fusilli with braised octopus and bone marrow at Marea in New York City. "A lot of people have written about it, and rightly so," Bruni said. "It's kind of unusual sounding, but it's a fantastic dish." The Red Wattle Country Chop at Vinegar Hill House in Brooklyn got a mention, and so did the country pate at Joseph Leonard, which Bruni said was "a fun restaurant in the Village."

Bruni also offered some thoughts on another kind of heavy consumption these days -- that of information. He doesn't own an e-reader, and he didn't waver on his preferred format -- the traditional book. "I'm 45, so most of my reading was pre-Internet, pre-computer. But I like reading the printed page. I love holding a book in my hand. I love the aesthetic. I love looking at a book cover. And I love the typeface of a book."

Bruni sees two developments in how content is consumed that could pose a problem for the future of the book. One is the availability of so much free information.

"I worry sometimes that the culture of the Internet, which is that reading material is free, is hurting newspapers, magazines, books," said Bruni. "There are now generations of consumers and readers who have done and will do most of their reading on a computer screen, which is fine. It's not a complaint, just an observation. But along with doing most of their reading on a computer screen, they are used to free information and free reading material.

"What I wonder about in an era where more people grow up reading for free is: Will it be difficult to get them to pay for reading formats that cost money? If they're reading on a computer screen, and reading lots of good intelligent material without ever tendering a penny for payment, are they less likely than their forebears to pay $25 for a hardcover?"

Bruni's other concern is the constant stream of bursts of information. He's not opposed to social media like Twitter (you can follow him @FrankBruni), he just questions a steady diet of it. "This is the era of staccato bursts of information," he said. "The era of text messaging and Twitter. The question I have is will all this tweeting and texting and short blog posts orient people towards staccato reading and hurt long-form books? Or will it in fact burnish the appeal of long-form reading as a lovely, lyrical, languorously-paced alternative to the boom boom boom and tweet tweet tweet."

With all of the changes facing the publishing industry, one shift that doesn't faze Bruni is e-books. As an author, he is all for them. "I like any form of reading that keeps people reading and paying for book-length material and thus reading books," he said. "I think e-books are an inevitable and fine convenience. They're not the aesthetic form I prefer, but if someone says, 'I just bought your book,' I'm just happy they consider it worth their reading time. Some see the e-book as a bogeyman. If we as a world of book-loving people can find a way to translate books into formats that keep people reading and paying, that's great." --Karen Schechner