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Summary
Summary
An extraordinarily moving memoir from an iconoclastic new talent--an artist, cook, and New York Times illustrator whose adventures at home and abroad revealed the importance of living life with your eyes wide open.
An extraordinarily moving memoir from an iconoclastic new talent--an artist, cook, and illustrator whose adventures at home and abroad reveal the importance of living life with your eyes wide open.
Best known for her witty illustrations, and as a cook beside her mischievous father in her family's legendary Manhattan restaurant, in Mumbai New York Scranton, Tamara Shopsin offers a brilliantly inventive, spare, and elegant chronicle of a year in her life characterized by impermanence. In a refreshingly original voice alternating between tender and brazen, Shopsin recounts a trip to the Far East with her sidekick husband and the harrowing adventure that unfolds when she comes home. Entire worlds, deep relationships, and indelible experiences are portrayed in Shopsin's deceptively simple and sparse language and drawings.
Blending humor, love, suspense--and featuring photographs by Jason Fulford-- Mumbai New York Scranton inspires a kaleidoscope of emotions. Shopsin's surprising and affecting tale will keep you on the edge of your seat.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Graphic designer, illustrator and short-order cook Shopsin can now add author to her resume. The author chronicles a bumpy year in her life with brisk, brief paragraphs: her trip with her husband to India; her work as a short-order cook in the family restaurant, Shopsin's, in Manhattan; the couple's life in Scranton, Pa., as freelancer designers; and weathering a serious illness. Diarylike entries are punctuated by Shopsin's spare drawings and her husband's photographs. During their trip to India, Shopsin seemed to be suffering with a nasty stomach ailment. Sick and stuck in the bathroom, Shopsin writes she couldn't stop puking, yet she nevertheless observes that the elaborate embroidered hot water bottle covers provided by hotel staff remind her of props from Little Women. On her father's penmanship: "My dad used to handwrite the specials on a dry erase board at our restaurant. He would add and delete items weekly with nail polish remover. I still think of his handwriting as smudged capital letters." Initially Shopsin's style is a bit jarring, as if you were reading idle jottings lifted haphazardly from a journal. What could have become merely an amalgamation of keen observations, Shopsin has instead spun into a charming, rewarding, and unusual narrative. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
On a trip to India with her husband, Jason Fulford (the book's photographer), well-known cook and New York Times illustrator Shopsin contracts what she believes to be a terrible case of food poisoning. But she soldiers on through the rest of trip, touring villages and odd museums, like a garden made entirely out of thread. Back in New York, her illness doesn't go away, and she struggles to discover what's going on. Her diagnosis is blindsiding, and she masterfully evokes that same feeling of surprise for the reader. Despite the dire circumstances, Shopsin's dry, staccato sentences are very funny: Dr. Schorr comes in. He looks so much like Sigmund Freud it has to be on purpose. Her irreverent illustrations and pithy, whimsical writing complement each other perfectly as Shopsin recounts details that, though not providing a lot of emotional depth on their own, together limn a creative, playful, wry and resourceful woman in a crisis. Shopsin's compelling and unconventional memoir is terrifying until you realize that, since she's writing about it, there has to be a happy ending.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
I'VE managed to eat at Kenny Shopsin's legendary restaurant and customer-hazing clinic only once, thanks to a regular who had passed muster and brought me along to breakfast. This was when Shopsin's was still in Greenwich Village and felt like a crazed version of the general store it had once been; over the stack of plain pancakes that I ordered without knowing any better, I tried not to be too alarmed by the abusive banter in the kitchen between Shopsin and one of his sons - which sounded, to the uninitiated, like a job for 911. Could I call social services, I wondered, and still come back for more pancakes? I did try going back to Shopsin's a few times after that first visit, but I never made it past the door again. (It hurt more than being turned away from a restaurant should.) "Until I know the people," Shopsin explains in "Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin," a cookbook designed by his daughter Tamara and photographed by her husband, Jason Fulford, "until they show me that they are worth cultivating as customers, I'm not even sure I want their patronage." In a city where it's possible to bluff or buy your way into almost anything, Shopsin's has turned snobbery on its head by remaking the diner into a private club for a membership of the cook's choosing. Luckily for the rest of us, Tamara Shopsin, a graphic designer and illustrator whose work has appeared in the pages of the Book Review, has a much more egalitarian relationship with her public. Her new memoir, "Mumbai New York Scranton," with illustrations by the author and photographs, once again, by Fulford, throws the doors open on her father's restaurant (where she still works on Saturdays, cracking "unholy amounts of eggs" for brunch); brings the reader on a pilgrimage, through the crumbling museums and time-warped hotels of India and back again to the delis of Brooklyn and the supermarkets of Scranton, Pa., where the couple have a house; and most arrestingly of all, takes us inside the studio for a peek at her creative process. Oh, and there's the small matter of the sudden diagnosis of a brain tumor, a hemangioblastoma that explains why Shopsin can't balance on her bicycle anymore or keep down any of her food. Some memoirs are about travel. Others are about surviving a bigger-than-life family. Many of them are about illness, and the rare memoir gives readers a private glimpse of a marriage that's also a creative partnership. Just like one of the fabled items from her father's menu (look up "mac 'n' cheese pancakes" online some time), Shopsin's memoir does them all. Mumbai is the first stop on the book's itinerary. After, reuniting with her husband at the airport at 1 a.m. - "There are 100 unlicensed cabdrivers waiting for Jason and me to finish kissing" - Shopsin lets us tag along on the couple's wide-eyed crossing of southern India, which is different from the spiritual journeys we've come to expect. "I've heard about Americans who go to India and flip out," Shopsin writes. "They give away all they have with them, take out the max from the A.T.M., and return home changed forever." Not these two pilgrims, who have come to India in search of visual artifacts, hoping to fill rolls of film (Fulford) and notebooks (Shopsin) with the pieces of found art that are scattered all around them. Wrestling with the scarf from her shalwar kameez, which keeps dragging on the ground, Shopsin is far too practical to suffer for the sake of authenticity. She asks her husband "if we can buy some safety pins or Velcro. He says that is cheating." As winning as Shopsin's voice is, it's her formal strategy for the book that makes the India section more than just an illustrated travelogue. Her spare, present-tense narration is interspersed with her drawings - my favorite is a typewriter with a comically elongated roller for extra-wide documents, a loving ode to obsolescence - and Fulford's eerily composed black-and-white photographs, which sometimes depict the thing described but more often don't, building a larger world through association. In Mysore, as their trip winds down, the couple follow a crowd into an auditorium one night and end up watching a talent show put on by schoolchildren. Shopsin catalogs the acts in vivid detail, while Fulford's picture is more interested in the crowd; the men, straining to see the stage from the highest seats, are our stand-ins, and the page becomes a mirror in which the reader is transformed. Text and image work together in a marriage of complements. Reading the memoir feels like eavesdropping on Shopsin and Fulford as they collaborate. There are threads introduced in the "Mumbai" section that weave their way through the rest of the book and unify the whole. Shopsin and Fulford are both deadline artists, taking on freelance jobs for different publications, and the rhythm of the work is a constant. Shopsin takes us through the process of dreaming up an "illo" (shorthand for illustration) from the time she gets an assignment to the moment she presses "send" and delivers it, showing us how an artist carries her work with her no matter where she is and what else threatens to intrude. If you've ever wanted to share the elation of constructing a pyramid of chocolate doughnut holes, photographing them to look like cannonballs, and then having an editor sign off on the resulting work, then this is the book for you. Shopsin also revisits a short highlight reel of her illustration work for The New York Times, including a "tunnel of lard" that she sutured by hand to give it structural integrity. The restaurant is a touchstone too, and some of Shopsin's finest writing is devoted to her growing up in what the family called "the Store": getting rides home on the back of her father's motorcycle wearing a salad bowl duct-taped to a sweatband to comply with helmet laws; running wild in a New Jersey supermarket with her brothers and twin sister while her parents bought the week's supplies. ("Will the parents of the lost boy with the cape please report to the courtesy counter," one typical P.A. announcement went.) When Shopsin returns from India and isn't feeling up to her usual weekend shift in the kitchen, that's the first sign she might be suffering from something more serious than a traveler's bug. Still, she is a Shopsin, so even after a mass has been discovered on her brain stem and she's being rushed into Manhattan for an emergency M.R.I., she has the wherewithal to let loose a mini-diatribe: "We pass a sign that says 'Triborough Bridge Renamed R.F.K. Bridge.' I freak out. Why would the city rename a bridge everyone knows? The name isn't even debatably offensive, like the Tomahawk Chop. Unless the city now finds logic offensive." It's almost enough to make a customer forgive the sting of getting turned away from Shopsin's. Almost. If she writes another book as enjoyable as this one, then I'll think about it. Shopsin still works at her father's restaurant on Saturdays, cracking 'unholy amounts of eggs' for brunch. Benjamin Anastas's memoir, "Too Good to Be True," was published in October.
Kirkus Review
Graphic designer and illustrator Shopsin (C'est le Pied II, 2009, etc.) delivers a terse account of a visit to India and her work as a freelance artist, with asides on her marriage, novelties business and family's restaurant. As a traveler abroad, the author is a bit frail--always tired, always sick, often scared. Many readers may find her incessant whining and timidity irritating, until the discovery of what might have induced her frequent bouts of nausea and unsteadiness of foot: a brain tumor. But apart from the impulse to wish her a full recovery and admiration for her genuine courage during the ordeal, this has no bearing, after the fact, on the writing. Even if the disjointed narrative is meant to reflect the effects of the tumor on her state of mind, readers will still note the book's many shortcomings. The memoir is rambling and unfocused, offering 132 pages on her experiences in India yet no concrete take on the country or culture save for impressions of chaos. Readers may enjoy the story to the extent that they favor the author's odd marriage of clipped sentences and stream-of-consciousness style (with too many meandering eddies), yet it suggests that Shopsin simply wrote down whatever popped into her head. The book is freighted with trivialities and pointless digressions, and if there is the occasional arresting observation or fleck of wit, it's buried beneath an avalanche of irrelevancies. Punctuated with photographs that barely qualify as snapshots, it's a 288-page book with half as much content, given the curious "open" typography and page breaks. Some will find the approach whimsical, others superficial and undisciplined. A brisk but slapdash, unrewarding journey.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Mumbai New York Scranton 1. The plan was if I didn't see him, don't leave the airport. That was it. That was the whole plan. It's 1 a.m. The arrivals area is outside under a giant carport. The air smells like burning garbage. I see Jason so fast. It's almost funny. There are 100 unlicensed cabdrivers waiting for Jason and me to finish kissing. The cabdrivers are sad now, Jason leads us to a little desk out of the way where he prepays for our taxi. A few of the drivers follow us. They leave when we reach the prepaid parking area. There are rows of modern and vintage taxis. "I hope we get an old one!" I say. Our cab is not old or new. The interior looks as if an airplane seat from 1980 has exploded. It is upholstered in a crazy patterned fabric everywhere, even the ceiling. I love it. On the way out our driver stops at the airport gate. He gets out and goes into a little booth. Two boys come up to the car window one on each side. They put their hands out. Jason and I shake our heads no. I've heard about Americans who go to India and flip out. They give away all they have with them, take out the max from the ATM, and return home changed forever. The boys just stand there looking at us with wide eyes. They won't leave. I whisper to Jason asking what we should do. "Roll up the window," he says as he rolls his up quick. I follow his lead but my boy sticks his hand on the glass. The window closes by a hand-turned crank. I can feel the skinny boy pushing down. I'm playing chicken in the saddest James Dean movie ever. I continue to roll up the window and am about to squish his fingers when he yanks them out. Our driver returns. The side of the road is lined with crowded shantytowns. Jason holds my hand and suggests I don't look out the window. Jason has wanted to show me India since the first time we met. My sister didn't say don't go. If she had, I would never have come. But Minda made it clear she didn't want me here. She's afraid I'm too fragile for India, that I will end up shitting chocolate milk and come home weighing eighty-seven pounds. There are no streetlights. I'm frightened. Jason asks the driver why he has turned off the main road. The driver says it is a shortcut. Jason tells him we would rather stay on big roads. The Grand Hotel The hotel elevator sings a song when the doors open. Our room is on the top floor. I open the desk's drawer and paw the turquoise and purple stationery with 1960s typography. Jason has bought me oranges. I eat them all right away. I take a shower, careful to keep my mouth shut and puffed full of air. I brush my teeth using bottled water. Even wash the toothbrush off with it. A travel doctor told us never to drink the tap water here. He also prescribed five hundred dollars' worth of medicine to bring. I filled the prescription uptown near his office. The pharmacy gave me four complimentary tote bags. Really nice ones with a lining. Jason turns off the lights. He tells me there are more oranges in the minifridge for when I wake up in the middle of the night hungry and jet-lagged. In the middle of the night I wake up and eat all the oranges. Excerpted from Mumbai, New York, Scranton by Tamara Shopsin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
