Christine O'Brien

Christine O'Brien's new book is Crave: A Memoir of Food and Longing. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: At what point did you decide to write this memoir, and how long did it take you to write it?

A: My first impulse is to answer this question by saying that I’ve been writing about my life since I was 9 and begged my mother to buy me a very ugly little green diary with gold-edged pages and a lock and key attached. I’ve always had the desire to record my life’s events.

More specifically, I began working on shaping various tucked-away pieces of my writing into a memoir while I was in the MFA program at Saint Mary’s College of California. In the MFA program I worked on the story of the Program for a year and the manuscript became my thesis.

Many more years went into the book after I graduated, in 2011, as I attended to it on and off. If I string together the hours I put into it, I would say that I’ve spent roughly five to six years working on this story.

Q: How was the book's title chosen, and what did you and the other members of your family crave during the years you were growing up?

A: The book was originally entitled Hungry but after Roxanne Gay’s memoir, Hunger, was released my editor at St. Martin’s Press thought we should rename it.

He noticed that I use the word “crave” many times throughout the story and felt the term encapsulated the meaning of the memoir even better than “hungry.”

My brothers and I craved almost anything you could think of because you name it, it was off limits. Literally. Even something like...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue