Today, my guest is Brigit Binns, a prolific author of cookbooks. She has more than 100,000 copies in print, including 11 titles she’s authored for Williams-Sonoma. She has also co-authored cookbooks, edited cookbooks, and written 90 shows for the Food Network series, the Hot Tamales. And now she has turned her attention to memoir. Her new book is titled Rotten Kid, a Succulent Story of Survival, just out from Sibylline Press. Listen in and read along as we discuss how to write a multiple-themed memoir, and much more.
Powered by RedCircle
Brigit: Thank you so much for having me, Marion. It’s an honor to be on your wonderful show.
Marion: Well, thank you. I love that. And I’m so grateful and I adored the book, so we’re going to have some fun. Your father is Edward Binns, a famous Hollywood actor of the large and small screen. Your mother is a breathtaking narcissist. You are left to tag along after these vivid people until you find your voice and make your own name in the world of food. So food, Hollywood, neglect, celebrity, infidelity, cooking, betrayal, narcissism, recipes, and transcendence. Let’s just take a minute. Those are some big and compelling themes, and they’re all here. And I work with memoir writers all day, every day, and frequently the question I get asked is, “How do I handle all these themes in my life?” So let’s talk about that just as to start off with the construction of this idea, did you make a list of themes you wanted to include, those you’d wanted to completely exclude? What happened as you sat down first to think up this book? How did you manage all these large themes for Rotten Kid, A Succulent Story of Survival?
Brigit: What an interesting question. I didn’t think at the beginning about all the different themes, because what I thought was that there was a book in there that wanted to come out. And long ago I went to Marfa, Texas, for a month to try to start working on it, and I was alone. And I thought maybe some of that talent floating around in the air there would land on me. But there was… Yeah, nice idea, right?
Marion: I love it. And if only. Road trip: Marfa.
Brigit: But the problem was there was this heater in the kitchen that was making these clanking noises, and I became convinced that the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” was going to happen in my bungalow and I got nothing done, shoved in all in a plastic Walmart box, all my notes and all that stuff, and didn’t take it out until the pandemic.
Marion: So I remember reading that in the acknowledgement section or in the epilogue section at the end of the book, I remember reading that. And so what do you think, along with the pandemic by that time, you had published a bunch of cookbooks, your father had died, your mother had died, what do you think allowed you to get to it?
Brigit: You just mentioned the fact that my parents had died, and that was a big deal because I didn’t feel that I could write that book, especially while my mother was alive. And also I didn’t feel I could release it while Jerry Brown was still the governor because there’s some stuff in there about his father, the first Governor Brown who had an extended affair with my mother, and he was my godfather as well. And I just didn’t think it would be fair to Jerry to release it. Plus I couldn’t write it, so I wasn’t ready.
Marion: And that’s just it. “I wasn’t ready” is a really interesting phrase that has so much pathology underneath it. It’s like one of those man of war out in the ocean, you see the top of it, but underneath are these enormous tentacles. And I wasn’t ready. People were still alive. I didn’t want to embarrass anybody, want to hurt anybody. So what do you think about the pandemic said now? Was it the solitude? Was it really just the recognition, “Hey, wait, everybody’s dead and I have this time alone”? Just give us a sense of how it kicked in.
Brigit: I think that was a part of it, that everybody’s dead and I have this time alone. I have difficulty disciplining myself unless I have a deadline. And of course, there’s no deadline on a memoir really, unless you have a contract, which I did not. So I’m used to working under deadline for all of the cookbooks, and suddenly there was this yawning gap of time in front of me. And also I did a workshop with Elissa Altman, I’m not sure if you’re familiar.
Marion: Oh, I love her. Love her.
Brigit: Yeah, don’t we all? I mean, she’s amazing. And she had written Motherland and I did the seminar with her and she talked about permission, the permission to tell your own story because there are plenty of people in my book that are still alive and you can get bogged down with, well, is somebody’s feelings going to be hurt? Are they going to disagree with what I’ve written? But the thing is that it’s my story. It’s not someone else’s story. And I think that’s what I took away from Elissa’s seminar was that I have permission to tell my own story.
Marion: Oh, that’s so generous of you. And I think permission is one of those words that sometimes stubs our toes because we think, well, now wait a minute, I’m a good feminist. I don’t need permission from anybody. Actually, a lot of writing gets caught up with this idea of permission, and I think that’s very generous of you to offer that. And I did, I interviewed Elissa some time ago, and I’ll put a link in the transcript to that because I think she’s a goddess, absolutely.
Brigit: She’s fantastic.
Marion: She is. And so book setups are complex and memoir setups are truly complex. Since we don’t want to know your height, weight, and place of birth to start, ’cause that’s just not going to sweep us into the story. We want to know what’s at stake and we want to delivered in the details that will clue-in the reader to what you need to overcome. And you organize, deliver, and produce and write yours perfectly. Honestly. The opening line of chapter one is, “I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth and a knife in my back.” And you go on to introduce your narcissistic mother whose self-regard includes the fact that you at 11 have never had butter. Your mother does not allow it. We’re in old California on a ranch, your movie star father ends up throwing that aforementioned butter at the ceiling in a sleigh ride of a book opener that hurtles toward our recognition that you were a girl who is playing vainly at being part of a happy family. Nicely done. So what did the first draft of that read like?
Brigit: Well, that’s an essay. That first chapter was a standalone essay that I worked with an editor when I lived in upstate New York. I worked with a wonderful editor there named Bethany Saltman, and she helped me refine that into an essay which I sent around and nobody published it, but that was the beginning of what it was going to be. That wasn’t always the opener in the first draft of the book, the opener because of the advice in medias res that sometimes we want to start in the middle and then go either backward or forward. The original opening of the book was the scene where I’m hurtling down the side of the Pyrenees in a huge truck with air brakes moving my life from England to Spain because I thought it was very dramatic. But what I learned later was that it was confusing and that it was better as a present tense middle of the book scene.
And I went through, I have to say, four different editors, freelance editors, because I knew that I could never bring this to readiness by myself. I’ve always known that editors were important. And if I could just segue for a second, one of them told me, “Get rid of all these bow tie sentences.” And I said, “Well, what’s that?” He said, “Well, you’re presaging. You’re revealing, you’re tying something up with a pretty little bow.” And in fact, he was a proponent of the school of show, don’t tell. Whereas then I found Phillip Lopate and his mandate is to show and to tell. And that really made a huge difference in the book. That was the turning point where I felt like I could bring it in.
Marion: That’s a great reference. The Phillip Lopate difference, that market differentiator with him and different editors. I say this to people all the time, they say, “Oh, I’ve got 18 beta readers.” And I say, oh, poor you, because you’re going to get 18 different pieces of feedback and they’re going to be very contradictory. So you need to work with somebody whose advice resonates with you and whose advice makes your story move forward. So yours clearly did, and I’m delighted that Phillip Lopate is part of that. I’m a huge fan of his.
So on your website, it reads, “Food brings people together to share love, pain and their spirit.” And it’s food you learn and food that you master. And it’s food where you made your career and great success. And I wonder, because I’ve dealt with other cooks and on their memoirs whose publishers tried to get them to stick to their one brand.
“Oh no, you’re famous for your cooking. I don’t want to hear about being bipolar. I don’t want to hear about your tortured childhood.” And I wonder if you got any of that pushback ’cause you went in for the larger tale, narcissistic mother, neglectful famous father, and much, much more. And not just the story of someone with remarkable success in the cooking world, and publishers of course are in the market to sell books, and they frequently want their authors to stick to that. So talk to me, did you get any pressure to just be a food person and not this whole person that you reveal here?
Brigit: I did. From people that I trusted as well. My friend Meathead of the spectacular website Amazing Ribs dot com.
Marion: Oh yeah. Oh yum. I’ll just say Yum.
Brigit: Yes. And I work with him a lot and I do trust his opinion, but he’s a little bit throwback. He wanted way more recipes and way more stories about how I became a cookbook author. I didn’t want that. I’ve written 30 cookbooks. I wanted to move away from that and I was willing to take the risk. You also don’t want to go the other direction, which is like the drunk who’s hanging on your arm at the wedding saying, “And then this happened, and it was just so interesting.” You have to try to take out the stuff that is extraneous to whatever your themes are. So I guess I figured out that my theme was definitely not food. The main theme was survival against glittering odds, I would say. And it was the narcissistic mother, the neglectful father, and the need to be peripatetic, which I’m confronting now as I am wishing I could move to Italy. But I keep moving around the world to do what? To get away from something? And I think I hope that that comes across in the book. That’s part of my theme.
Marion: Good. I’m going to quote you forever about the drunk who hangs onto you at the wedding. That is such a great way of defining that story that just keeps, “Oh no, but wait, wait. It gets really interesting now. Wait, wait, wait, wait until I get…” No, I’m not going to wait. Either grab me or not. So drunk that hangs onto you at the wedding is my new favorite way to criticize a story. This is like the… Good. I promise you I’m going to use it. So let’s talk about vulnerability. It’s an essential piece of memoir and we need you to let us in, but we need to see it in scenes.
Phillip Lopate absolutely is right, show and tell, but we need those scenes. And you’ve got some very vivid scenes. You attended seven schools and made some very interesting decisions before you were 16. Your mother shoves a .22 caliber shotgun into your stomach at one critical moment. Your father, Edward Binns, who starred in movies and television is memorable in his neglect. Your mother, who you more tagged along behind than accompanied in life would say things to you like, “Look, Brigit. There are some children.” Trying to also characteristically slide you off her plate. So you’re honest with us. And I felt it. I felt the vulnerability. But it’s required if you want us to understand who you were so we witnessed the transcendence to who you become. So talk to me about writing with such vulnerability into your own truth.
Brigit: Well, honestly, I feel like there’s absolutely no point in working in memoir unless you are going to expose your veins, unless you’re going to open the veins, there is no point in doing it. It’s not good for you and it’s no good for the reader either. And I think when I understood the concept of reflexive retrospective, which can also can be called by different names, which makes it impossible to Google search, but the idea that we would see things from a dual perspective, that the reader would see something from my perspective as a child, but then be, in Lopate’s words, be treated to the value of understanding what I think about that from my current point of view.
Marion: Yeah, that’s exactly it. Reflexive retrospective and it allows us to feel and that’s what we need to do. And speaking of feeling, whenever I have a memoir writer on the podcast, I always ask the same question, so I will ask it of you. And that’s what are we asking a memoir writer to do when we ask her to go back into a trauma and write about it? Are we asking her to reanimate it or are we asking her to relive it? Or are we asking her to sort of stand coolly by over here and watch it from a distance?
Brigit: And my succinct answer to that is yes. Yeah, I think we want a little bit of all of those things to be honest.
Marion: Good. Yeah. I think so too. I think that there’s so much going on in your book, and I felt so strongly throughout it, but it was because you were able to reanimate some. Some you were so clearly looking at from here and even along with us saying, “Wow,” right? Wow. Yeah, that’s good. I like that. I like that yes, all of them.
Brigit: Yeah, because a little bit of each, it’s like seasoning a dish. You don’t want all dill, you want a little bit of mint, you want a little dill, you want a little lemon juice. That’s what makes it palatable to the reader is a little bit of everything, I think. And what editors can do for us is identify when we’ve gone too far in one direction because it’s so difficult to read your own work, to edit your own work. You need in addition to those beta readers whose opinions were certainly very valuable, that had the professional editors who said, look, this is really interesting and love your perspective, but it doesn’t belong here. And of course now I save all that stuff and I can now use it on my Substack, which is a place for essays that didn’t belong in the book or current thinking. And as I think a wonderful place for writers and readers.
Marion: Yeah. And you mentioned before, you mentioned that the opening of this book was an essay, and let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about testing your material on different platforms. And you say you didn’t sell that essay. That surprises me. It’s so well done.
Brigit: Thank you.
Marion: But publishing, it’s the damnedest thing. And so testing your material, you’ve got Substack, I know, you’ve got your website, so how do you parse out book, Substack, website? In terms of what you were testing or what you were publishing, just talk to me about that sort of multi-platform and the decisions you make about what to put in where.
Brigit: Well, I was a very early blogger with my little blog called Roadfoodie dot com. The Huffington Post called it “one of the best food and wine websites,” but I think I had six followers and half of them were related to me. But it was a great way to keep my mind engaged when I was driving across the country twice a year for six years. But now I have Substack. Roadfoodie is long retired. Substack is a place where I can test out ideas for my upcoming book, which is actually going to be fiction and like nothing I’ve ever done before and totally scary, but I would not put too much on there. I’d rather share with my beta readers and my writing coach in Portland. If I have snippets of the novel that I think need help or I need direction, I’m less likely to put it out there on Substack. I would reserve that for me exercising my chops as a non-fiction writer.
Marion: Love that. So will this writing coach handle fiction, non-fiction? Is this somebody, you’ve mentioned editors, you’ve mentioned beta readers, but is this writing coach somebody you’ve been with for a long time or can you just talk a little bit about what you go to a writing coach for? I think so many people would benefit from having one, but they just don’t know what to ask.
Brigit: Well, that’s a very good point. And it’s hard to sort through. So it really is going to depend on a personal relationship or a personal recommendation. And I was lucky enough the publisher that I ended up going with, Sibylline Press, is all women all the time and all of them are extremely talented. And one of them just happens to be a writing coach as well as a writer whose work I have read all of and respect, and I have decided to throw my lot in with her. Is there somebody else out there that might be better? I don’t know. But I can’t interview all of them and that’s too difficult. So I have to choose someone whose words about writing really resonate with me. And she also recommended several craft books because all the craft books I had for memoir are no longer pertinent to fiction. And this is akin to discovering Phillip Lopate except for on the fiction side. And so I couldn’t do it without a coach. I need someone who I can trust to bounce chapters off of to be honest.
Marion: Yeah, I think that’s great to bounce chapters off of and I think that’s exactly the right thing to enter that relationship looking for. Right? So you mentioned Sibylline Press, which I’m fascinated by. It takes its name from the Sibyls, prophetesses or oracles in Ancient Greece. On their website they state that they publish the work of brilliant women over 50, and I love that. And they refer to their authors as a collective. This is my first experience with Sibylline and I hope not the last. So talk to me a bit about working with them and choosing them. My audience is writers and they are so interested in where to get published and why to choose a certain publisher and how to get published with that publisher. Their website’s great, but hey, you just published a gorgeous book with them. So talk to me a bit about them.
Brigit: Well, I had originally wanted to go with a traditional publisher just because that’s what I’ve always done with the cookbooks. But as we all know, that business is very compromised, very different, very difficult. And also my agent had just retired and I went out in search of agents for this project and was told by people I knew personally that there’s no market for a privileged white girl’s story at this point.
And so, one of the editors that I hired happened to be one of the founders of Sibylline Press, and I didn’t know that she was about to launch her own publishing company. I got her through the wonderful Diane Jacob who recommended her as an editor. And after we got through the book, she turned around and put on her publishing hat and said, “Well, we’d really like to publish your book.” And it’s a hybrid, but not a hybrid. They call themselves a trade publisher, but there is an element of author participation, but the residual royalty structure is incredibly, incredibly generous up until you pay yourself back for whatever you might have invested. And it’s just an amazing group of women that are so mutually supportive and we’re so excited to be in the first season. I think it’s absolutely worthwhile because you know what? It doesn’t matter so much who publishes it anymore. It just matters that it gets out there.
Marion: And with your platform, you can handle the promotion. I mean, it was easy to reach out to me. I’ve seen other blurbs, I’ve seen other publications featuring the book. So I think that there’s a publisher for everybody is the way I look at it these days, whether it be traditional publishing, hybrid publishing, this which reads more like collective publishing with a very interesting business model. I read all through it and I’m going to put a link in the episode notes to let people know where to go and look and read up. It’s fascinating to me. And so for the novel, as we start to wrap this up, I do want to give a pitch to the novel. So for the novel which you’re working on now, are you considering Sibylline again or are you going to wait, are you going to… I mean, when you make this kind of plan to make an inroad into yet another type of publishing, yet another genre of publishing, do you have in mind how you’d like to be published or are you just writing the book and you’re going to take it from there?
Brigit: I’m just writing the book and going to take it from there. Although I would be honored to be in another season with Sibylline, I have no idea at this point. Even though the coach is part of the group now, it would make sense for me to publish with them again. But I’m not going to make any assumptions. I have no idea whether I’ll be any good at this or not, but it is actually, the novel is based on my mother’s time in The Bahamas in the mid-fifties when she was married to a Navy commander who was stationed down there. And I have her diaries and her letters of the time, but I’m going to turn it into a sort of, don’t want to give away too much, but a murder by fish.
Marion: Well, I can see the promo now. Well, you go get them. And thank you so much for coming along today. The book is a joy, it’s a delight to talk with you. It’s wonderful to meet Sibylline Press. I’ve had a great time and I’m deeply grateful. Thank you, Brigit.
Brigit: I’m so honored to be here with you, Marion. Your podcast is a go-to for people who want to write, and I’m happy to connect with you and with them. So thank you so much for bringing me in.
Marion: You’re welcome. Thank you. The author is Brigit Binns. See more on her at Brigit Binns dot com. The new book is Rotten Kid, a Succulent Story of Survival, just out from Sibylline Press. Get it wherever books are sold. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at Overit studios dot com. Our producer is Jacqueline Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit Marion Roach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes in how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.
Want more help? Join me in live, online memoir classes
Start here, with The Memoir Project System Page, to understand the breadth of all the classes we teach.
Want to jump right in? Here’s a sampling of our classes.
Memoirama: Live, 90 minutes. Everything you need to write what you know.
Memoirama 2. Live, two hours. Limited to seven writers. What you need to know to structure a book.
How to Write Opinion Pieces: Op-eds, Radio Essays and Digital Commentary: Live, 90 minutes. Get your voice out into the world.
And keep in mind that I am now taking names for the next Master Class, the prerequisites for which are Memoirama and Memoirama 2. Live, once a month. Limited to seven writers. Get a first draft of your memoir finished in six months.
