As I read Kathy Watson’s compelling memoir Last Morning at Nora’s Table, I found myself thinking about Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Both books hinge on a shocking death, but Watson’s story is, for me, the more powerful.
Watson starts the memoir in the kitchen of her first restaurant, then reveals in well-structured chapters how a woman with a background in journalism and no formal culinary training becomes a celebrated chef in Oregon thanks to the two restaurants she opens in the Columbia Gorge.
Watson’s father died in a horrific car accident when she was just six years old. Her deeply unstable mother wasn’t up to the task of raising her two children. By the time Watson was nine, she was doing all the cooking in the house.
The book toggles between Watson’s steep learning curve in the restaurant business and the story of her painful childhood with a mother as likely to backhand her for a small infraction like spilling milk as to turn warm and generous with a surprise gift. This non-chronological structure can fail an author if one storyline proves more compelling. But Watson is as deft on the page as she is with the recipes that made her meals so remarkable they drew diners from across the Pacific northwest.
Her emotional cadence gives the book a rhythm that feels like a classic day in the Columbia Gorge where the weather can go from brooding to lit with incandescent beauty in a heartbeat.
Watson has an eye for the telling detail. Here’s how she describes her first stab at cooking when her mother, in too much pain to feed her children, remains in bed.
In the kitchen, I dragged a red vinyl chair over to the electric stove and poured a can of Campbell’s Vegetable Beef Soup into a pot and added a can of water. I took two eggs and rested them next to the stove. I had watched Dad cook eggs, whistling Dvořák, his long, muscled arms moving the skillet and spatula with ease.
The recipes tucked among the chapters made me want to go shopping immediately and get busy in the kitchen.
This fine memoir reveals a woman’s struggle to value herself. It documents a husband’s sturdy devotion. It renders the beauty and challenges of life in the Columbia Gorge in exquisite detail. It’s an intriguing collection of recipes that respects Oregon’s local foods.
It is also—in a sharp, unflinching way—a daughter’s love story to a broken mother.
Reading it, I felt enriched by the power of the human spirit. But I was also a little sad that I never had the chance to eat at Nora’s Table.
The book comes out in February, but can be preordered online.
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