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I’m a reality television show fan, which is a thing, even for smart people who read a hell of a lot, and my favorite program, hands down, is Top Chef.
There is a new season out, and I am watching it, even though Padma Lakshmi left, and this last episode was a good one. There was a messy interpersonal conflict, and a bunch of people cooked bad stuff, and the podcast recap show, Pack Your Knives, dug into it.
I was listening to the podcast in the shuttle from the hotel to the conference venue of the 34,000-person tech conference in Rio de Janeiro where I spoke three times this week.
I love this city.
Rio has a green that shocks you, and the botanical garden is one of the best I’ve ever seen. There is dark coffee, and lots of coconut, and a lovely, lilting language, and there are books.
And there is also Clarice Lispector.
Clarice, which Brazilians just call by her first name, is one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century, and she hangs like a strange, dark mist above the city. There are statues. There are benches.
Clarice is crazy. When you read her work, you don’t know what you are reading at times, the way she slaps strange words together, the way she builds narratives out of nothing –- a wealthy woman, in her maid’s room, turning into a cockroach, for 193 pages? She is a force. Some call her “Hurricane Clarice.” You must read her. Have I mentioned? She is crazy?
(Clarice Lispector, The Paris Review: Madam of the Void.)
So, Clarice is crazy and Rio is amazing. But my god there is traffic. There is so. much. traffic. I was sitting there in the traffic, in the shuttle, listening to the podcast about Top Chef when one of the hosts said something about the contestants on the show that made me stop.
The goal, he said, is to stick around long enough to tell your story.
Top Chef is set up like many competition shows.
You start with a bunch of impressive folks, and then week by week they are eliminated on the backs of awful mistakes (uncooked rice, raw beef but not on purpose, soup that eats like sauce), or just not being not as world-class as everyone else. The challenges do get harder as the group of competitors gets smaller, but they also get less contrived. Team challenges that once focused on using specific, problematic ingredients broaden out to the final challenge, which is always some version of this: cook whatever the hell you want, but make it amazing.
Tell your story through the food.
It doesn’t take a master’s degree in analogies to see that this idea - to stick around long enough to tell your story - doesn’t just apply to being a chef on a competition show.
It applies to all of us.
The dishwasher who starts chopping onions and then works his way up to starting his own restaurant, showcasing the food close to his heart. The guy in the mail room at a big agency who rises to run the publishing division, ultimately seeing his own visions reflected in the reading habits of millions. And to Clarice Lispector, who overcame so much.
Born to a Jewish family in what is now Ukraine, she fled from the natural disasters and hellish pogroms in her homeland to Brazil as a baby, only to then grow up poor, lose her long-sick mother at 9, her father at 20, and then, amazingly, after dogged work and a realization that law school wasn’t her path, publish her first book at 23. That book, Near to the Wild Heart, won a huge prize for the best debut of the year, and one critic, the poet Lêdo Ivo, said it was “the greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language.” Another said it had “shifted the center of gravity around which the Brazilian novel had been revolving for about twenty years.” Until her death, at 57, she kept writing.
Clarice knew a thing.
She knew the point of being here at all, eking it out on this flashy spinning thing, is to figure out your story, and tell the hell out of it.
There are different ways to tell a story and a million different stories to tell. And you rarely get to do this out of the gate. (The mail room, the onion chopping, the problems.)
But stick around long enough, and you just might get the chance.
Greetings from Madison, WI where the most recent season of Top Chef spent some time.
Your sentiment resonated with me. I have run far too many (closing in on 30) marathons and have long said "if you don't finish, no one will listen to your story." Your story title seems more about longevity and patience where mine is about holding someone's attention. There may be room for both.
Thank you for great writing, and—now—a new motto. I'm not going to have it tattooed on my forehead or anything, maybe an index card over the desk. But I love this: "Stick around long enough to tell your story." (Okay, maybe the forehead.)