Three Layer Cake

Interview with Ann Bauer, author, food critic

(Read Ann’s most recent story on Salon.com, A Marked Woman)

When you speak with her, one of the most striking things about Ann Bauer is her intellect, delivered through incredibly crisp clear words and a steady, reassuring voice.  As she talks to me, she is waiting in her car while two of her sons shop together for shoes for their school dance.  Engaging and kind, she is instantly someone I wish were a regular acquaintance in my life.

Ann is a divorced, full-time working mother of three sons.  She graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2002, and then taught nonfiction writing to students at Brown University.  During that time, Ann began work on turning her MFA thesis into a novel.  After declining to renew her contract with Brown, she moved back to the Twin Cities area, where she currently resides, and completed her novel.  While finishing the novel, she also worked as a freelance writer and a food editor/critic for the Minnesota Monthly magazine.  As a regular contributor to Salon.com, many non-Minnesota natives were introduced to both Ann the novelist and Ann the food critic.  Her 13-year struggle with her oldest son, who at age four withdrew entirely with symptoms closest to Asperger’s Syndrome (similar to autism), was the subject of her most successful piece of non-fiction writing to date, “Finding Fargo”.  The emotions that she experienced during that struggle are also the heart of her first novel, A Wild Ride Up the Cupboards. 

In a similar sensory experience for the reader, her January article “Food Slut”, stepped on the toes of amateur food critics and industry insiders alike, as she eloquently and candidly articulated her disillusionment with the modern food industry and what it represents for America.  Love it or leave it, readers’ strong reactions to “Food Slut” and personal connections to “Finding Fargo” and A Wild Ride Up the Cupboards, let Ann know that she is hitting her mark.  She’s not a polemical writer, nor does she do reportage.  In her own words, her focus, “whether I am writing essays, fiction, or food reviews, tends to be on narrative and its power to engage the reader.”  Her goal is to awe the reader with an idea or an experience fit into context.  What happens to her is irrelevant, she says, unless it means something to the reader.

Ann's Story 

What has happened to her, however, is quite relevant to shaping where she is today.  Out of high school, Ann went to University of Iowa with the hopes of attending the Iowa Writer’s workshop.  She met her now ex-husband, and father of her children, during undergrad and they wed and started a family immediately.  At 23, she was already a stay-home mom.  She describes their lifestyle as free-spirited and lovely, living on pennies a day, carrying their gorgeous baby boy around in a marsupial.  By the time the second baby was born three years later, the financial realities kicked in, and at the same time their first son withdrew with symptoms of autism.  For the next ten years, Ann spent every ounce of her energy to get through to her son and pull him out of the world he had slipped into, the world no doctors or any other experts could clearly locate or define.  The relentlessness which she exhibited in pursuing her son’s improvement and reconnection to home is one of her most defining and rewarding characteristics.  “I have always been focused, whatever it is, I will not stop. Determination and ambition have served me well.  Being focused has helped me reach and draw my son out.  I did not draw my son all the way out.  But I got him out.” she says flatly.  But just as those traits have also served her well in the professional sphere, they also contributed to the deterioration and dissolution of her marriage.  “I don’t know what the trajectory [writing] would have been if I’d had a smooth marriage and typical children.  Dealing with my oldest son definitely put writing on the back burner for six or seven years, but at the same time fueled it.  It was the same reason I was a food critic and was questioning that industry.”

Her first novel:  A Wild Ride up the Cupboards

Through her writing it is evident that the struggle has given her the insight to write such powerful non-fiction as “Finding Fargo”, the piece which has reached more people to date, and her debut novel, A Wild Ride Up the Cupboards, which has cut across all reader groups.  It is the story of Rachel, whose four-year old son withdraws from the world, focusing on Rachel’s attempts to help her son improve.  It is also about the parallel events in Rachel’s grand parents lives and how those events intersect with her own life and marital struggles.  The book, soon to be released in paperback, was originally slated to be marketed to families of autistic children.  Ann refused.  She felt that the message she developed for the book about the dangers of loving too hard had a much wider audience.  The book deals with difficult life questions, such as do you put your spouse ahead of your child and what latitude should be given to parents in seeking to treat ailing children.  Not just families experience these hardships, she believed.  Her instinct to widen the marketing target was right on.  She has received overwhelming feed back not just from parents with autistic children, but parents with drug-addicted children, people confronting marital difficulties because of ailing family members, and people who have had to make tough family decisions and who are now dealing with how those decisions have played out.

But even as Ann has lived the experience of loving ‘too hard’ and the consequential losses, she is not at all bitter.  She speaks of the end of her marriage in stride, with the attitude of someone who has clearly identified the source of a problem and has found the appropriate solution.  I asked if, among all of the other problems she has tackled over the years, her other children, ages 15 and 11 (her oldest son is 18), ever felt neglected or were negatively influenced.  She answered with great satisfaction, “I think they have actually been advantaged.  They have become more human because of the experience.  They turned down my offer of sending them to therapy to deal with all of the stress that they have experienced.  They said that it’s their brother and they don’t need therapy for that.  Now it’s just the four of us on our own, and we do well as a unit.  They never rebelled.  I have three ‘good eggs’.”

Her next book:  Food as the central theme

And speaking of good eggs, Ann is currently working on her next novel “about hunger, sex, love and the fear of being consumed”.  It will be loosely based on “Food Slut” and what she learned about the food industry when she worked as a food critic.  The central themes she hopes to deal with in the book revolve around the “art museum quality of attention” and value put on food by a certain sector of society, and the inverse relationship between the epicurean class food and the overweight.  One of the lesser developed points in the “Food Slut” article hit on this latter theme, the “constant conundrum” of the body obsessed.  Ann feels as though those who live in the food world and constantly talk and lionize food value slenderness to the exclusion of the more important issues surrounding food.  ‘So you mean, they eat good food, they have the time and money to go to the gym, and they are vain and all good-looking,” I asked.  “No”, she answered thoughtfully, “I mean that everyone I came across who was a chef and had access to the freshest greens and was able to eat food that had just been picked two hours before was thin and healthy.  I think that a body which is fed high quality food, like microgreens and high quality organic produce, runs better.  It’s more efficient.  But access to such high quality food is unrealistic for the majority of Americans, so what about people who can’t afford that?”  She told me how she had gone to a grocery store in one of the poorer neighborhoods of St. Paul just the week before, and had noticed that what is affordable are the prepackaged fried apple pies, moon pies, and processed sweets with ridiculously low prices, like 2/$.49, when the cost of eating fresh vegetables is prohibitive for a one-income family with children, like hers has been for many years.  The protagonist in her new novel is about the plight of a 700-pound man who is part of the food industry, in sharp contrast with his slender colleagues.  Her goal is not to preach about the dangers of a society which is moving toward privilege even when it comes to food, but is merely to open the discussion up and its elements for readers to be able to evaluate themselves.  The new novel is less true to her life than the first, however the themes are just as important to her.

Since leaving her position as food editor at Minnesota Monthly Magazine, Ann has gone on to be a Senior Writer at the Minneapolis office of Larsen, a strategic communications firm.