Reading Ruth Reichl's new book, "Save Me the Plums," you can't escape the conclusion that her life has been rich with serendipity.
In this fourth memoir, the acclaimed food writer recalls the 10 years during which she helmed Gourmet magazine, whose sudden demise in 2009 stunned its loyal readers. Her connection to the publication, at the age of 8, makes her journey to its editor's desk _ along with so many other moments that propel the story _ seem like an act of destiny.
Reichl, a precocious reader and adventurous eater, recalls encountering her first issue of Gourmet while accompanying her book-editor father to a New York City bookstore. The image of a glistening fish leaping off the cover of an old issue had caught her attention. Inside, she found rapturous writing, an artful blend of travel and recipes, that swept her from a dusty alcove to the shores of Maine, where rugged lobstermen made it possible for even the landlocked to savor a taste of the good life.
In the shell-shocked weeks that followed Conde Nast publisher Si Newhouse pulling the plug on the grand dame of epicurean magazines, a former coworker gave her his late mother's carefully preserved Gourmet magazine collection.
Riffling through the boxes, she soon found herself holding the issue that started it all.
During a recent telephone interview with The News & Observer, Reichl felt the need to point out that this story and other stunning moments of kismet really happened. Like when she wandered into a Paris dress shop and the owner insisted she try on a vintage couture gown that fit her like a glove � and soon after met the original owner's adoring widow in a cafe, only to meet him again years later on her final assignment for the magazine.
"I think we all live lives of extraordinary serendipity," she says. "As a writer, I just pay more attention to it.
"I do feel like at every point in my life, I've fallen into the next thing," Reichl adds. "I never went after any job. I didn't try to get the job at the Los Angeles Times, or The New York Times, or even Gourmet. I didn't even want them."
The book is written in Reichl's signature style, which suggests an intimate phone call with a friend you haven't talked to in years but can pick up with right where you left off. Its title is taken from a poem by William Carlos Williams, in which an eater apologizes for being seduced by the irresistible call of cold, juicy plums.
One also can view "Save Me the Plums" in the context of a plum assignment, a term for a highly desirable gig. Such were the opportunities that led Reichl from cooking in restaurant kitchens to editing and writing criticism of them at two of the nation's major newspapers.
She loved those prestigious jobs until she didn't, like when she was confronted by a cook who was fired after a negative review. When first courted by Gourmet, she thought they, too, wanted reviews until Newhouse invited her to run the magazine as she saw fit.
"Who else gets them to give them a magazine and say, 'Here, make it great' _ and doesn't meddle?" she says, still marveling at the creative freedom.
While Reichl writes about an almost desperate discomfort in ongoing meetings with Newhouse, and a growing sense of doom as advertising revenue slumped with the 2008 recession, she sincerely thanks him for allowing her to transform Gourmet with stories from leading writers willing to address uncomfortable food-related topics.
Perhaps that is what made its death so painful, not just for Reichl and her close-knit staff, but also the readers who still can't fathom why Conde Nast closed Gourmet instead of its less refined sister publication, Bon Appetit. (When she was called to Newhouse's office, thinking she might be fired, she refers to the end of Gourmet as "murder.")
"I certainly thought they would fire me, but it literally never crossed our minds that they would close the magazine," Reichl says. "We were too much in love with the notion of a Gourmet world."
Since then, Reichl wrote her first novel, "Delicious!," and "My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life," about how rediscovering home cooking helped her deal with post-Gourmet grief. She is working on another novel now and consulting with Netflix on an eight-episode version of her second memoir, "Comfort Me With Apples."
"I don't think I could have had my career if I was born today. There are a million other people like me," says Reichl, who deflects the notion that few food writers are quite like her.
"How lucky was I to be a person interested in food," she says. "Just as it was starting to have its moment?"
