Born Round Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  ·ONE· - I’m Eating as Fast as I Can

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  · TWO · - Yo-Yo Me

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  · THREE · - Ipso Fatso

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  · FOUR · - Critical Eating

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Acknowledgements

  ALSO BY FRANK BRUNI

  Ambling into History:

  The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush

  A Gospel of Shame:

  Children, Sexual Abuse, and the Catholic Church

  WITH ELINOR BURKETT

  THE PENGUIN PRESS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) · Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0R L, England ·

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

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  First published in 2009 by The Penguin Press,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Frank Bruni, 2009

  All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following articles by Frank

  Bruni published in the The New York Times: “Life in the Fast-Food Lane,” issue of May 24, 2006; “Giving Luxury the Thrill

  of Danger,” February 7, 2007; “Where Only the Salad Is Properly Dressed,” February 28, 2007; and “A Plea for Respect for a

  Familiar Fish,” August 1, 2007. Used by permission of The New York Times.

  Photograph credits: Page 228: The White House; 287: Davina Zag ury; 313 and 331: Soo-Jeong Kang;

  346: Katharine Q. Seelye; Other photographs courtesy of the author

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bruni, Frank.

  Born round : the secret history of a full-time eater / Frank Bruni.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-13345-3

  1. Bruni, Frank. 2. Bruni, Frank—Childhood and youth. 3. Overweight men—United States—Biography.

  4. Compulsive eating—United States—Case Studies. 5. Reducing diets—United States—Case studies.

  6. Food writers—United States—Biography. 7. New York Times Company—Biography.

  8. Italian Americans—Biography. I. Title.

  RC552.C65B78 2009

  362.196’85260092—dc22

  [B]

  2009009532

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To my brothers

  Mark and Harry

  and my sister, Adelle.

  You three are the luckiest hand I ever drew.

  And to my nieces

  Christina and Annabella,

  because you missed out the last time around.

  Author’s Note

  The names and certain identifying details of a few people in this book have been changed out of respect for their privacy. And while none of the people, events or conversations in this book were invented, some conversational details lay beyond the reach of memory, so dialogue has been reconstructed through interviews and other reporting, and fashioned in line with what I know and remember of how the people, including me, spoke. I can’t vouch for its pinpoint accuracy in all cases, but I can vouch for its truth.

  Introduction

  I got the phone call in early January 2004, as I looked out over the uncertain expanse of a new year.

  I was in my office in Rome, and I was probably drinking an espresso. I was almost always drinking an espresso. The newspaper’s Rome bureau, like any self-respecting Italian workplace, had a proper espresso machine, and my assistant, Paola, like any self-respecting Italian, knew how to make a proper espresso. So whenever she said, “Ti serve un espresso?” I said, “Sì! Sì!” even if she’d last served me one just forty-five minutes earlier. An espresso allowed me to consume something without consuming anything of caloric consequence, to finagle a pleasure along the lines of eating without actually eating. And the acids and caffeine in it revved up my metabolism. I had read that somewhere. Or maybe I had simply made it up and then, as with so many of the greater and lesser food lies I’d told myself, made the executive decision to believe it.

  On the other end of the line was an editor in charge of a department of the newspaper different from mine. I worked for the Foreign News desk, keeping one eye on a sinking Venice, the other on a flagging Pope. She supervised several “soft” sections: the Style pages, the Home pages and—the reason for her call—the Dining pages. I assessed prime ministers; she, prime beef.

  But she had a thought about that. She had an idea.

  “Restaurant critic,” she said.

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right.

  “Restaurant critic,” she repeated, in the middle of a sentence explaining that the job was open, that there were people at the newspaper who thought I might be right for it, and that she happened to be one of them.

  She wanted my reaction. She wanted to know: How did I feel about eating for a living?

  Eating for a living?

  Without meaning to, I laughed.

  She didn’t appreciate the robust absurdity of what she was asking, the big, fat irony of whom she was asking.

  Because she had stayed put in New York while I’d moved frequently and traveled widely for the newspaper, she hadn’t laid eyes on me for the better part of a decade. She wasn’t clued in to what had happened to me during that time: the way I’d given in to my crazy hungers and crazier habits; how large I’d grown; how long I’d been trapped at that size, in that sadness; how determinedly I’d slogged my way back to a leaner, better place.

  The Rome assignment had presented itself toward the end of that slog, in mid-2002, when I was living in Washington, D.C., and part of what it promised and then delivered was a clean break, a new beginning. In Rome I made friends who hadn’t known me
at either my fattest or my fittest, hadn’t watched me ricochet between the two, back and forth, up and down, never at rest, never at peace. They saw me afresh: a fairly average guy in his late thirties, maybe fifteen to eighteen pounds over the strict medical ideal for someone just under five feet, eleven inches tall, certainly chunkier than the Italian norm, but broad-shouldered and attractive nonetheless. Nothing unusual. Nothing humiliating.

  In Rome I ate relatively ordinary meals and I ran or went to the gym at least three times a week and I wore jeans again—I finally wore jeans again, not worrying about how much more snugly than chinos they fit. I had a serious romantic relationship, my first in more than seven almost entirely celibate years. At the beach I took my T-shirt off. Not right when I got there, and not all the time. But some of the time: if there weren’t too many narrower people around; if I was standing up or stretched out; if I’d done a decent run or workout that morning or the night before; if I was feeling light and good.

  Was this how I’d be from now on? Was I finally safe?

  I couldn’t know.

  But some sort of confidence—maybe even courage—had apparently taken hold.

  I didn’t cut the editor’s call short. With welling interest I listened as she made a case that I was a quick enough learner, a self-assured enough thinker and a nimble enough writer to set off in an unanticipated direction and try my hand at something wildly different.

  And then I told her I’d consider it.

  It wasn’t likely to go anywhere, anyway. In my nine years at the newspaper, I’d written about politics, religion, crime, immigration, movies, books and the Miss America pageant. I’d never written about food, not unless you counted stray paragraphs about George W. Bush’s fondness for peanut butter and Cheez Doodles, not unless you factored in a feature story about Las Vegas residents larding themselves at all-you-can-eat buffets. (That was one from the heart.)

  I knew more about papal encyclicals than about Peking duck, and had little more reason to believe I’d get this restaurant-critic job than to believe I’d be anointed the next Pope. But why not revel in the compliment of being thought capable of such a stretch? Why not let the idea bounce around my head, imagine the miter on my head? It was a harmless fantasy.

  And then it wasn’t.

  Just weeks after that first call from the editor in New York came another: the job was mine if I wanted it.

  Did I?

  Saying yes would mean leaving Rome about midway through what was typically a four-year stint, and that gave me pause. While I had made my way to Sicily for stories on three occasions and had managed four trips to Florence, I was still trying to find a justification for Capri and Positano, and in time I was sure I would. And my Italian had finally progressed from deducible to out-and-out discernible. Serviceable was right around the bend.

  Saying yes would also mean putting myself in the path of sometimes withering scrutiny in New York, where the newspaper’s restaurant critic had a significant effect on the fortunes of chefs and restaurateurs, who sporadically (and understandably) fought back. I didn’t long for that.

  But there was, of course, an even more compelling reason not to say yes, and it came up during one more call, this one from an editor higher up the newspaper’s chain of command, an editor who had seen me over the past decade.

  She wanted some reassurance, but not about my confidence in tackling this new subject matter or my comfort in switching from correspondent to critic. And not about whether I had made peace with leaving Italy, when living there had been a lifelong dream.

  Speaking as a friend more than a boss, she pressed me on a different issue altogether: whether an agenda of eight to ten major meals a week in serious restaurants—a mandatory program of night after night of ambitious and sometimes excellent food—was a risk I really wanted to take. Something I could really handle.

  “Are you sure,” she asked me, “that you’re willing to sacrifice the good shape you’ve gotten into?”

  I was sure I wasn’t. And for reasons I was still working out in my head, I’d come to believe I wouldn’t have to. I told her that, and we agreed that I would set off on this strange adventure, in spite of a past in which appetite and circumstance had combined to such neurotic and sometimes pitiable effect.

  Maybe, I thought, this decision is insane. But it was also irresistible, even poetic, the kind of ultimate dare or dead reckoning that a good narrative called for.

  My life-defining relationship, after all, wasn’t with a parent, a sibling, a teacher, a mate. It was with my stomach. And among all the doubts, insecurities and second-guessing that had so often shadowed me, there was one certainty, one constant. I could eat.

  Me in early 2001 (left) and more than four years later, after becoming a restaurant critic, with my sister, Adelle.

  ·ONE·

  I’m Eating as Fast as I Can

  One

  I have neither a therapist’s diagnosis nor any scientific literature to support the following claim, and I can’t back it up with more than a cursory level of detail. So you’re just going to have to go with me on this: I was a baby bulimic. I

  Maybe not baby—toddler bulimic is more like it, though I didn’t so much toddle as wobble, given the roundness of my expanding form. I had been a plump infant and was on my way to becoming an even plumper child, a ravenous machine determined to devour anything in its sights. My parents would later tell me, my friends and anyone else willing to listen that they’d never seen a kid eat the way I ate or react the way I reacted whenever I was denied more food. What I did in those circumstances was throw up.

  I have no independent memory of this. But according to my mother, it began when I was about eighteen months old. It went on for no more than a year. And I’d congratulate myself here for stopping such an evidently compulsive behavior without the benefit of an intervention or the ability to read a self-help book except that I wasn’t so much stopping as pausing. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

  A hamburger dinner sounded the first alarm. My mother had cooked and served me one big burger, which would be enough for most carnivores still in diapers. I polished it off and pleaded for a second. So she cooked and served me another big burger, confident that I’d never get through it. It was the last time she underestimated my appetite.

  The way Mom told the tale, I plowed through that second burger as quickly as I had the first. Then I looked up from my high chair with lips covered in hamburger juice, a chin flecked with hamburger bun and hamburger ecstasy in my wide brown eyes. I started banging my balled little fists on the high chair’s tray.

  I wanted a third.

  Mom thought about giving it to me. She was tempted. For her it was a point of pride to cook and serve more food than anybody could eat, and the normal course of things was to shove food at people, not to withhold it.

  But she looked at me then, with my balloon cheeks and ham-hock legs, and thought: Enough. No way. He can’t fit in another six ounces of ground chuck. He shouldn’t fit in another six ounces of ground chuck. A third burger isn’t good mothering. A third burger is child abuse.

  I cried. I cried so hard that my face turned the color of a vine-ripened tomato and my breathing grew labored and a pitiful strangled noise escaped my lips, along with something else. Up came the remnants of Burger No. 2, and up came the remnants of Burger No. 1. Mom figured she had witnessed an unusually histrionic tantrum with an unusually messy aftermath. But I’ve always wondered, in retrospect and not entirely in jest, if what she had witnessed was the beginning of a cunning strategy, an intuitive design for gluttonous living. Maybe I was making room for more burger. Look, Ma, empty stomach!

  It became a pattern. No fourth cookie? I threw up. No midafternoon meal between lunch and dinner? Same deal. I had a bizarre facility for it, and Mom had a sponge or paper towels at hand whenever she was about to disappoint me.

  As I grew older and developed more dexterity, stealth and say, I could and did work around Mom, opening a cupboard or p
antry door when neither she nor anyone else was looking, or furtively shuttling some of the contents of a sibling’s trick-or-treat bag into my own, which always emptied out more quickly.

  Mark (left) and me.

  I wasn’t merely fond of candy bars. I was fascinated by them and determined to catalog them in my head, where I kept an ever-shifting, continually updated list of the best of them, ranked in order of preference. Snickers always beat out 3 Musketeers, which didn’t have the benefit of nuts. Baby Ruth beat out Snickers, because it had even more nuts. But nuts weren’t crucial: one of my greatest joys was the KitKat bar, and I couldn’t imagine any geometry more perfect than the parallel lines of its chocolate-covered sections. I couldn’t imagine any color more beautiful than the iridescent orange of the wrapping for a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.

  And the sweetest sound in the world? The most gorgeous music?

  The bells of a Good Humor truck.

  Every summer evening, just before sundown, one of these trucks would come tinkling down Oak Avenue, a narrow road near the shoreline in Madison, Connecticut, just north of New Haven, where my father’s parents owned an extremely modest summer house. Mom and Dad would frequently bring my older brother, Mark, my younger brother, Harry, and me to visit Grandma and Grandpa there, and they would later bring my sister, Adelle, the youngest of the brood by more than four years, too. We would splash in the water, slaloming between the jellyfish, and dig in the sand. And after a dinner too big to leave room for anything more, we would run from the house to the street at the first, faintest whisper of those bells.

  Me, on a plump trajectory.

  I knew the options by heart. There was the Strawberry Shortcake bar, coated with sweet nibs and striped with pink and white. There was the cone with vanilla ice cream and a semihard hood of nut-flecked chocolate over that, and an argument in its favor was the way the eating of it had discrete chapters: hood first, ice cream second, lower half of the cone after that.