Well, Which Is It?

Yesterday I spent some time at the library, researching a particular aspect of Julia Child's career. I had an idea for a piece — which may or may not work out — and I needed to do some initial investigation.

Reading through a number of her biographies, side by side, I was struck by the inconsistencies among them. For instance, Laura Shapiro's slim book Julia Child says that Mastering the Art of French Cooking only sold 16,000 copies in its first year, not taking off until a year after its release. Noel Riley Fitch's detailed Appetite For Life says, "By August, less than a year since publication, Mastering had sold 100,000 copies … and was in its fifth printing."

When writing of Louisette Bertholle's royalty amounts, Fitch says that they were 18 percent (versus 41 percent each for Beck and Child) for conceiving the idea. (She did very little on the book itself.) Joan Reardon, in an article about Mastering for the Summer 2005 issue of Gastronomica, says that it was 10 percent.

These are not books about days of yore, with archivists and researchers piecing together scattered, weathered scraps of data. Some of the participants in the Julia Child story are still alive. Child herself was when Fitch's book came out in 1999. And I imagine Knopf, the publisher, still has records from that time. Shouldn't they be more consistent?

My inclination is to trust Fitch's account, if only because of the extensive detail. (You could make the case that Reardon's 10 percent is a typo; the rest of the piece lines up with Fitch's account, at least for the parts I focused on.) But Shapiro says she used Fitch quite a bit. Does she have new information about initial sales? Or is this an editing issue: Did Shapiro mean that the book only sold 16,000 copies in 1961 (it came out in October of that year)? Or perhaps her note that sales didn't take off until fall of 1962, which might have been before October, actually lines up with Fitch's account, who merely lumps the entire first-year sales together without giving a breakdown.

Creative Nonfiction Workshop

The wine class I teach didn't happen this semester. Poor economy, low enrollment, class canceled.

I could have just taken a break, I suppose, but I decided to improve my writing with a class named Creative Nonfiction Workshop that I wouldn't have been able to take while I was teaching in the same time period. I'm decent at research and the mechanics of writing, but the features that resonate with readers are those with stories, and I lack the tools to consistently write those pieces. I've tried to develop them on my own — I've studied Gay Talese and read through Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction and William Blundell's Art and Craft of Feature Writing — but the techniques didn't stick.

My professor divides the class into two conceptual halves: heavy on lecture for the first five weeks and heavy on discussion for the next five. The lecture part helped us craft scenes, paint useful characters, present meaningful dialogue, show — not tell — details, and evoke a feeling in the reader. These are all tools for fiction writers, of course, but they have useful roles in nonfiction as well. In the discussion portion, we spend most of the class critiquing our fellow students' pieces, discussing what works and what needs improving.

I noticed right away that my fellow students generally have more serious topics than I. Most of them have a story to tell and they want to get it out there — the young theater major with the passionate but unconsummated love affair, the woman whose adult son died while in his 20s, the woman writing about a Vietnam vet. I just want to be a better writer. So the class inevitably wanders into topics I'm comfortable with: how to get started, how to finish, and how to revise. But I still find new nuggets in the professor's discussion of these subjects.

I can see the change in my writing. I compare the second piece I'm writing to the first piece, and I see richer details, scenes that establish place and time, and better dialog. I come home from class inspired about new topics and ways to present older topics. I take extensive notes in class.

I'm ready to go back to the wine teaching circuit, but I wish I had the ability to take more writing classes like this one.