BEYOND MEASURE
Jackie Kai Ellis opens up about depression, baking and why she wrote a memoir
The Measure of My Powers: A Memoir of Food, Misery, and Paris Jackie Kai Ellis Appetite by Random House
Jackie Kai Ellis has made a name for herself as a writer, a baker, a foodie and a traveller.
Through her various social media feeds, she serves up a carefully curated slice of her colourful life to her fans and followers.
One quick scroll through Kai Ellis’s Instagram account yields a buffet of images: a breathtaking sunset snapped in Paris; an edible army of cookie dough balls waiting to be popped into the oven; and a beautiful basket filled with what appears to be flowers but ends up being an abundance of surprisingly stunning mushrooms.
With so much beauty on offer, it may surprise some to read about the darker, less picture-perfect moments of her life that she lays bare in the new book, The Measure of My Powers: A Memoir of Food, Misery, and Paris.
“I made this an exercise in vulnerability,” Kai Ellis says. “I wanted to be as strong as I could possibly be by being as vulnerable as I could possibly be.”
But when she was first approached to do the book, she admits her response was an immediate, emphatic no.
“I was, like, no way, no way,” she says with a laugh.
So, why did she do it?
According to Kai Ellis, the project passed the four requirements she looks to have fulfilled before she’ll agree to join a project.
“The first would be that I am passionate about it, that I love it; the second would be that it uses my unique talents and skills; … the third one is asking whether it is going to make me a better person to have done it; and the fourth thing is, is there a chance that, by doing this project that it would help someone else in some way?”
In the end, Kai Ellis says she felt that opening up about her past struggles with an eating disorder and depression might benefit readers — as well as herself.
“I wrote it thinking, if nobody ever reads this — fine. I have nothing to lose. Because, by the end of it, it helped me,” she says.
“But I thought, just maybe, if I write this in the most fair way possible to myself and to the other people involved, maybe someone might read it and think someone knows what I’m feeling. Depression is an incredibly lonely, isolating thing. You think you’re the only person in the world that feels that way.
“So, just to know that someone else understands. That you’re not alone.”
Speaking from her new home in Paris, Kai Ellis recalled how it was the process of sharing some of the personal stories detailed in her book, privately, with close friends and family first, that further prompted her to put them down on the page.
“There was a lot of commonality between the stories I was telling,” she says. “The number of times people would say, ‘I’m struggling with depression,’ or ‘I have body issues.’ People could relate to them.”
She’s hoping the insight into her past also provides those fans that follow her world travels and edible escapades that her life isn’t all photo-ready moments and sunny holidays.
“The struggle with social media is it’s so limited with showing these types of real situations. You get a split second. How are we supposed to show something of deeper substance, or stories of compassion or understanding ? You get a split second and 140 characters,” she says. “And when people don’t feel like they know the whole story, they judge quickly.”
While Kai Ellis shares a side of her personal history that she’s rarely made public in the book, after reading it, one gets the sense she is still holding something back. When asked about it, she’s the first to admit it is true.
“Whatever I was holding back is just stuff I haven’t fully come to terms with yet,” she says. “And I needed to allow that to be.”
Kai Ellis says one area of her past where she held back had to do with details surrounding her former business, Beaucoup Bakery, which she sold to longtime employees Betty Hung and Jacky Hung last year.
“I tried to go there more,” she says of the eatery. “But I do think there are, strangely enough, some traumas there. And it’s not that I’m not willing to share (them), it’s just that I haven’t even processed them yet.
“The emotions — I haven’t got to that layer of the onion yet.”
Fans of her food-writing career — not to mention her baking — may be a bit disappointed to discover that, while the book offers recipes and details of some of Kai Ellis’s favourite dishes, it’s not a classic cookbook.
Kai Ellis wouldn’t have it any other way.
“There are some people who are passionate about doing that. And I just wasn’t,” she says about creating a how-to cooking and baking guide.
“I felt like I wasn’t going to contribute anything to the world of cookbooks that hadn’t already been done. And I didn’t feel like it would have grown me, or made me a better person.”
Instead, The Measure of My Powers reads like a diary of sorts, detailing pivotal moments in Kai Ellis’ life, and then highlighting a recipe tied to the personal anecdote.
From finicky croissants to a summery potato salad, the dishes are sweet-and-savoury (if seemingly difficult to make) eats that are meant to tell as much as the words that sandwich them do about the real Kai Ellis.
Which of the edible delights would Kai Ellis point to as one of her favourites?
“I love the chocolate chip cookies. They’re really good, but I also love what they mean and how they make people feel when I make them,” she says fondly.
“Every time I make a chocolate chip cookie, people smile. That’s just the way it is.”