Publishers Weekly
04/11/2022
Garden & Gun columnist Reed (Julia Reed’s New Orleans), who died in 2020, profiles activists and artists, travels to exotic locales, and offers tart advice on food and fashion in this colorful essay collection spanning her 40-year career. The book opens with Reed’s first byline, a Newsweek story about the 1980 murder of Scarsdale Diet doctor Herman Tarnower by his girlfriend Jean Harris. (Reed, a college sophomore and “part-time library assistant/phone answerer” at the magazine, got the assignment because Harris was the headmistress at her former private school in McLean, Va.) Elsewhere, Reed has a spirited sit-down with death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean (“I quit trying so hard not to take the Lord’s name in vain when she told me an old Mickey Mouse joke with the f-word in it”); recalls how her friends treated her “like someone just diagnosed with a brain tumor” when she called off her first wedding; visits a beauty school in war-torn Kabul, Afghanistan; and reflects on how cooking brought her solace during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Sharp and fearless, these essays are a fitting tribute to Reed’s life and career. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
"Sharp and fearless, these essays are a fitting tribute to Reed’s life and career." —Publishers Weekly
"A selection of sparkling essays by a great Southern wit, foodie, fashionista, and prose stylist...There is life after death—at least for an essayist with this much verve on the page." —Kirkus Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
2022-05-11
A selection of sparkling essays by a great Southern wit, foodie, fashionista, and prose stylist.
Reed (1960-2020) was a 19-year-old undergrad at Georgetown when the headmistress of her former boarding school killed the doctor who created the Scarsdale diet. An editor Reed had interned with at Newsweek remembered the connection and sent her to cover it. So began a brilliant career. The breezy foreword by Roy Blount Jr. fails to tell the novice a few things that bring the joys of this sampler of Reed's magazine work, dated and organized by theme, into sharp focus. The details about Reed’s death, following a long battle with cancer, affect one's reading of the essays she wrote that year, hilarious accounts of her "first world problems" during the pandemic—e.g., pest infestations; the complexities of quarantine cooking and dining. "On Mother’s Day, [my mother and I] sat at opposite ends of my outdoor table and shared a rack of lamb with an inspired mint sauce,” she writes. That was their last Mother's Day, and they both knew it. Her decision not to mention her illness in this or any other essay that appeared in her long-running column in Garden and Gun recalls Nora Ephron, another seemingly candid but actually quite reserved personal essayist always ready with the bright, deflecting wisecrack. Similarly poignant are essays that touch on Reed’s friendship with André Leon Talley, the late Vogue editor at large and kindred spirit. Talley helped her order her trousseau for a huge Mississippi wedding she cancelled at the last minute in 2011—then took the honeymoon anyway, she and her ex-fiance joining Talley and other friends in Paris. Also preserved in this collection are prime examples of Reed’s droll, incisive writing about her Southern roots alongside puff pieces on the Bush twins and surprising angles on Nixon, Cheney, and others. As Blount points out, Reed was “a Republican—of a decidedly secular, anti-Trump, anti-death-penalty, gender-and-race-friendly, Delta-proud variety all her own.”
There is life after death—at least for an essayist with this much verve on the page.
