I first saw Jennifer Hayden's Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner, published in November, leaning towards the production side of food and making comic hay about Hayden's inability or unwillingness to do it well. Then I noticed My Perfectly Imperfect Body by Debbie Tung from September, which is more focused on the consumption side of food, and a bout of disordered eating in Tung's youth.
Published in between the two of those is The Joy of Snacking, from Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell, whose work I've seen as a cartoonist in The New Yorker, but has also done a previous comics memoir, illustrated several other books, made a few documentary movies, and also works in burlesque.
Snacking is mostly about eating - young Hilary was what we call "a picky eater," and that's continued into her adult life. (She's now in her early thirties.) The spine of this book is, as the title implies, "snacking" - Campbell is one of those people who eats lots of little bits all day long, isn't terribly fond of big meals, and tends to focus on a few preferred, beloved, standard snacks. (She also says this is a youngest-kid thing, which made me realize my younger son is also a grazer - there's a kind of bowl that he uses to gather stuff to eat, and we see them pile up in the sink - so I tentatively think her theory has some merit and she should get a major research grant to investigate it.)
Campbell organizes Snacking into loose chapters, bouncing between two timelines: her childhood and young-adulthood, as she discovered new foods and mostly tried to avoid them, and the last few years and her tumultuous relationship with a man she calls E. Separating scenes or sections are cookbook-like pages, which are each about a food Campbell likes - apples and peanut butter, or "a baggie of goldfish," or "a bowl of potato chips," or Cool Ranch Doritos - with details on how to "prepare" them, when and where to eat them, and their significance to her.
It might be the fact that this isn't her first memoir, but I found Campbell to be harder on herself than other people - in particular, E comes across (maybe, though, because I am a man) as a fairly reasonable guy trying to live with Campbell's issues, as the two of them snipe at each other in that deeply nasty way some couples develop. I'm sure he had his flaws, but I felt that Campbell presented him in a mostly-positive light: he's a guy who is in many ways her opposite (a foodie who works selling wine to restaurants!), but they made it work, more or less, for a number of years.
This is not a how-I-changed book, or a I-fixed-my-problem book. Campbell likes snacking. She's going to continue doing it. On the other hand, this isn't entirely a celebration, since she's also clear that she had a weird, often unpleasant childhood because of her food issues, and that it's affected her adult life in ways she doesn't like. That tension plays out throughout the book - can she be herself, eat the stuff she likes (and maybe "normal" food, too, OK, sure, sometimes), and go through life with less stress and anxiety? Well, maybe. But how about some popcorn and white wine now, while she thinks about it?
This is a big book, with some aspects I've not even mentioned - Campbell traces the eating habits of her parents as well in flashback sections, so it's not just a book about her individually - and a warm open-heartedness I found deeply engaging. Campbell has a cartoony, dense style here: her people are loosely defined with thin lines, her panels are many and jammed together without gutters, her dialogue is long and rambling, like real people. This is a fun book about a distinctive person who's not afraid to show herself being odd and quirky - that's the whole point of the exercise. I don't know if anyone else eats quite like Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell does, but, then again, do any of us really eat like all of the rest of us? This book made me wonder that - and that's a good thing to wonder about.
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