Frank Bruni Revealed

Yanina Manolova / AP Photo The formerly incognito restaurant critic for The New York Times releases an incredibly revealing memoir this week. He talks to Nicki Gostin about his struggle with weight and more.

Is there a better job out there than restaurant critic? After all, what could be better than dining at fabulous restaurants in a wig from the Raquel Welch collection (if you’re a woman) or a giant Tom Selleck-like mustache (if you’re a man)? Oh, and of course the beauty of it all is that someone else pays for all those three-course meals.

Frank Bruni was the famous, though incognito, restaurant critic for The New York Times for several years, but when he was offered the plum posting, in April 2004, he hesitated. He was the Times' Rome bureau chief then, and his editor was also concerned. Bruni had battled with his weight all his life and had recently shed 70 pounds. Would he be able to nibble on foie gras, slurp fettuccine Alfredo, and sample chocolate mousse without putting on weight again?

Happily, the answer was yes, and the story is charmingly recounted in his memoir, Born Round. Bruni candidly writes of his weight struggles, which included bulimia, laxative abuse, and junk-food binges. Anyone who has ever dreaded stepping on the scale will relate when he reminisces about his dreaded ascent to size 42 Gap khakis. But though the subject is serious, the book is a completely hilarious, wonderful read.

Bruni is now a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. We spoke recently about his weight-loss secret, finally taking off his disguise, and the horrifying act of reading his book on tape.

Why did you decide to write this book?

Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater. By Frank Bruni. 368 pages. Penguin Press HC. $25.95. Short answer is I thought I had a good story to tell. I thought that I was at a point in my life where I had spent a lot of time trying to forge a healthier relationship with food, and in trying to figure out how to enjoy food the way I wanted to without being undone by it. I had done a lot of thinking about my relationship with food over time, my relationship with my weight, and as I thought about all of it, I thought, there’s a story here. There’s an interesting adventure that I think will resonate with anybody who’s ever worried about how much they love food—or on even a more minor level, struggled with his or her weight—and so I wanted to tell that story. Also, I’m a big reader of food journalism and food literature, and I’d read many, many wonderful memoirs by journalists focusing on the world of food, and none of them, none of the ones I’d read, kind of explored the other side of eating, which is overeating and the peril of letting one’s love of food tip into excess.

Unfortunately, don’t you think your story is very American?

I don’t think I would have written this book—and I don’t think I would have been able to come to a healthier relationship with eating and food (I hardly think I’ve got it all solved)—if I hadn’t lived in Western Europe precisely when I did. I moved to Italy right after I had worked my way back from being about 70 pounds overweight, and I had the good luck of moving to Italy and working in Italy right at the time when I was trying to figure out, ‘OK, how do I make sure I never relapse?’ And I saw very starkly the difference between the way Western Europe and Americans view food. In Italy I don’t remember ever seeing a Big Gulp-type phenomenon. I don’t remember ever seeing signs that said ‘All You Can Eat Buffet.’ I don’t remember there being a super-size option at the McDonald’s that was right across the street from the Times bureau in Rome. There wasn’t that notion that the best thing that can happen to you is to have a super overabundance of food. To my eyes that was completely absent, and that for me was really instructive, helpful, and illuminating in terms of figuring out how to chart my own course with food.

Did you find it embarrassing to list all the junk food you binged on?

It wasn’t embarrassing to write it, or think about it, because writing is such a solitary act. It was more kind of cathartic and interesting. It was interesting almost in the way I think people in therapy try to make sense of their lives. Sitting and writing about it was helpful because it was a manner of therapy. It was a manner of taking a pause, creating a time to look back through and make sense of one’s own behavior. The only time I realized, ‘Wow I’ve let a lot of intimate stuff hang out for the world to see,’ was when I recorded the audiobook, because you do that, you’re in a booth and there are technicians right outside of it, and I had to read word-for-word the entire book. And only then I realized how extraordinarily personal and intimate some of it was, and how bound some of it was to be consumed by strangers; it was at those moments when I was recording the book. I was doing it looking through a pane of glass at two utter strangers who were hearing me confess and cop to all this stuff in real time.

Do you see your eating issues like an addiction to drugs or alcohol?

I do. I’m not qualified to say whether it is analogous to an addiction, but it feels that way to me. Based on what I have read, and anecdotally, based on what education I do have, I’m a fairly classic compulsive eater, and the compulsive aspect does feel like addictive behavior. But I mean I don’t have a history of therapy, I don’t have diagnoses, so I’m hesitant to use clinical language, but I do take it one day at a time. I don’t feel like, ‘Hey, I’m never going to tip the scales at 70 pounds overweight again. I’m cured.’ I don’t think that way, and I do approach it as more of a week-by-week, day-by-day way.