Memoirist Christine O’Brien’s ‘Crave’ uncovers all kinds of yearnings
We crave a lot of things. Food, if we’re hungry. Safety, if we’re scared. Normality, if we’re a little different. Love, always.
So which is it, Christine O’Brien?
“All of the above,” O’Brien said simply, with a wry grin.
The Walnut Creek author’s newly published “Crave: A Memoir of Food and Longing” (St. Martin’s Press, $28.99, 260 pages) details in poignant prose a childhood both shuttered from normality, yet in the spotlight. She grew up in New York City’s most iconic celebrity-laden apartment building, the Dakota, on Central Park West. Her famous neighbors included Leonard Bernstein and Lauren Bacall, who gave out Tootsie-Pops at Halloween.
O’Brien’s father was Ed Scherick, a producer of television (including “Bewitched,” “Batman” and “That Girl”) and films such as “The Stepford Wives” and “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.” Her mother, Carol, was a former beauty queen from Illinois. Parties at her home included guests such as Alan Alda and Marlo Thomas.
“But my parents were isolationists,” O’Brien said. “I only remember them throwing two parties while we lived at the Dakota. My dad schmoozed and my mom felt uncomfortable.”
As a child, she had lots of fears; New York in the ’70s was scarier than it is now.
“Muggings right and left. You never just walked down the street,” O’Brien said.
One of her fears was connected with the smell of Joy perfume, Carol’s “going out” perfume; it meant her mom was leaving her, going out into the frightening city. Carol was a nervous mother, constantly hovering, warning them of everything such as small waves lapping at the shore when O’Brien’s father fished, because you never know.
After Carol collapsed in their apartment one day and spent the next year in bed despite there being no physical illness, she began a regime of bizarre diets, such as raw liver, raw eggs, fresh yeast and at one point, coffee enemas. Then she forced the family to adhere to “The Program,” which was mostly celery juice and blended salads. Boxes of vegetables crowded the kitchen counters and her mother spent most of everyday mixing up her concoctions. Her father raged. O’Brien and her three younger brothers cowered.
But they stuck with the program out of loyalty to their mother, who at times demanded they do water fasts in the summer, when they stayed in bed for five days at a time.
“It was like solitary confinement,” O’Brien said. “But once you’re released from all those food sensitivities, you’d get into this high. So after that, I was always looking for that high.”
There was a high when she was 16, and the family took a house in Point Lookout on Barrier Island, New York. Boys noticed her for the first time, and she found a true girlfriend. But after she finished writing “Crave,” O’Brien found diaries written during that time, expressing her hunger, her shame at being different, her parents being elitist and not mingling
with the other summer families.
“My next memoir will cover just that summer,” O’Brien said.
Will it be called “Shame?” She grins.
“No, but maybe it should be,” she said.
The family eventually moved to Los Angeles, and her parents divorced. O’Brien went to UC Berkeley, met her husband, Tim, and started eating steak, which sent her into a guilt spiral.
“I always believed what my mother was doing with The Program was right which was hard, because I believed I wasn’t pure if I craved steak,” she said. “I still believe she was right, she was just 30 years ahead of her time. And the thing she didn’t understand was no one diet fits all. She was unhealthy because she was so rigid. I don’t think
you can be healthy if your mind is always looking for the way everyone else is wrong.”
O’Brien still adheres to a version of The Program. Meals are vegetable-heavy, with blended salad drinks that are way easier to make nowadays. She still craves steak and chocolate. “I have to have chocolate with me all the time,” she said, rummaging in her purse and bringing out a plastic bag with the remnants of bars of dark chocolate with raspberries and offering some.
O’Brien raised her two children, now in their 20s, to have a healthy relationship with food, but it wasn’t easy at first. “It was hard for me to watch them eat meat at first. I felt like I was ruining their innocence.”
Now a part-time instructor in English composition at St. Mary’s College, O’Brien is now riding
a high that comes from relief that the book has been so well-received. The New York Times reported she presents her parents with “loving generosity.” She’s been compared to memoirist Mary Karr (“Liar’s Club”), and her father’s still living contemporaries have told her he’d be proud. She feels her mom’s spirit is still with her, encouraging her, and describes what she thinks is a little sign of it she encountered while she was feeling most vulnerable while writing the book. “Look,” she says, pointing to a photo on her cell phone. “This is the tree outside my bedroom window. I woke up one morning, and this was the last leaf on it.” The remaining leaf was a large, perfect, bloodred heart.
“It’s her saying ‘It’s all right. I love you,” O’Brien said.