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In reality, it took a decade, but today, that book Save Me the Plumsis out.
Why do you think people are still interested inGourmet?
My father boughtTheNew Yorkerevery week, even if he didnt read it.
We were aNew Yorkerfamily.
And I thinkGourmetwas like that.
People bought five-year subscriptions, people bought lifetime subscriptions.
When it was gone, people didnt just lose something to read.
They really felt like it was a piece of themselves.
And I want to say to them,Did you even read it?
People definitely read it.
But people could ask for subscriptions without them.
We had a special list of people who demanded it.
One woman said that it was so horrible that she had to rip it off!
But she didnt throw the magazine out she just ripped off the cover.
Reading the book reminded me how fun it was to work atGourmet.
It was my first real food job, and I probably took that for granted at the time.
But it sounds like you didnt have much fun.The beginning was rocky because I really didnt know anything.
I had no idea what an adjacency was.
I didnt know what it was like to manage people.
It got much better when Larry [Karol,Gourmetsmanaging editor] came.
The book is really different than it would have been if Id written it right after the magazine closed.
So you end up hanging it on characters, and there were so many great characters at Conde Nast.
It was such a uniquely weird world.Thats why I wanted to write this book.
It was kind of magical.
Gourmets energy was very nonintimidating.
Literally people just wandered into my office, which is what I wanted.
I mean, pitching you a story was still a little intimidating.
I just didnt know any other way to do it.
Even the weekly line-up meetings were kind of fun.Those meetings were really fun!
You had to get this out.
Now go write the real one.
He did all kinds of things for us.
He walked up to me at a food conference and said, Would you read this?
I gave it to our executive editor and said, Sign him up!
Are there things you would have done differently if you had known that the closing was a foregone conclusion?
Doing ten TV shoots at the far corners of the world, its really time-consuming.
We would have taken even more chances, and done the most far-out things I could possibly think of.
Every advertiser would have known that people would hang onto that issue forever.
They left all this money sitting on the table.
It was at the printer.
Would you still be atGourmetif it were still around?I cant answer that.
I just dont know.
At the time, I was so torn.
The problem is the way magazines are made.
Its never the articles you love the best.
They dont sell adjacencies against David Foster Wallace.
They sell against Six Fun Things to Do in Mexico City.
Theyll be as long as they have to be.
The way we consume media has changedwhatmedia is.
But nonvisual forms of storytelling, like literature, feel like theyre less marginalized by the web.
You cant recreate certain experiences online.This gets into what I think magazines can be now.
If I had a magazine now, I would never do service stories in print.
As far as Im concerned, that would all go digitally theres no point doing that.
But I think of people consuming magazines, sort of alone, in bed at night.
You want something to fire your imagination, wonderful long-form stories.
Magazines started out as utilitarian, and that has all gone to the web.
Do you thinkGourmetcould even exist now in any form?I do.
I think theres more interest in food than theres ever been.
Look at the success ofLucky Peachwhen it was around.
Its a different demographic, but it was necessary.
They produce this great magazine, time after time, and I think readers want that peaceful space.
I was really proud ofthe Edna Lewis issue.
And I had a lot of favorite covers.
It was very early.
I was also proud of our produce issues.
It shocked people that we were talking about what happened on the farms.
Barry did the first piece about the problem with fish farms, too.
People would say, Yeah, but itsGourmet, and your recipes are too complicated.
And they werent complicated we had recipes that only took 15 minutes.
But we couldnt get beyond the idea that it was still your grandmothersGourmet.
That was both the magazines burden and its saving grace.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
