Life’s Work: An Interview with Ruth Reichl

Ruth Reichl says that the best career moves are the ones that scare you. First a cook, then a critic and a memoirist, and then the editor of Gourmet until its abrupt closure, in 2009, she’s learned to embrace transition. When her latest venture, the luxury food site Gilt Taste, was also shut down, she turned to fiction writing. Her novel, Delicious!, is out now. How did you make the switch from individual producer to manager when you took over at Gourmet? It’s not evident from my résumé, but I’d actually been a manager before—at the LA Times . I kept complaining about the food section, which at the time was the largest in the country—60 or 70 pages every week, with a big staff, test kitchen, and photo studio. So I was sort of blackmailed into becoming the editor. One day I was the restaurant critic, and the next day I had 20 people working for me. They kept saying, “We’ll give you management lessons,” but I never had time, so the learning curve was really steep. I was not initially the best manager. I inherited people who were really different from me. They were home economists, not writers or reporters. In the beginning I said, “Just give me your notes, and I’ll write it all.” It took a while for me to understand that management is an art, and to appoint a woman who was good at it as deputy. We learned from each other. My great triumph with her was that at the end of two years, she came to me and said, “I’m quitting, because being around you has made me realize that I’ve spent my whole life doing something safe, and if I’m ever going to find out what I really want to do with my life, now is the time.” She drove all around the country and ended up in Portland. And I learned that you really can’t expect everyone to be just like you. The big secret of management is to find what people do best, not to fit them into a mold. Find out what everybody on the staff does well and tailor their jobs to them, instead of the other way around. You’ve said that privacy is overrated, and your memoirs are exceptionally frank. But many leaders feel they need to keep a distance from their employees, and certainly between their work and personal lives. How do you handle that tension? I’ve never felt the need to keep a distance from my employees. I think the more you know about the people you work with, the better. Do you think that as leaders, women bring something to the table that men don’t? I do. I think woman leaders are one, more practical and two, much more sensitive to the whole issue of balancing work and family, which is the big problem facing corporate America today, everywhere from restaurants to big businesses. We need to find much better solutions so that people can have satisfying home and work lives. Every time some young editor at Gourmet came to me and said, “I’m pregnant,” I would say, “Now you’re going to understand what guilt is: If you’re at work, you’ll feel like you should be home. And if you’re home, you’ll feel like you should be at work. No matter where you are, you’re going to feel guilty.” As a nation, we have to solve that problem. So how did you manage your own work/life balance, especially when your son was growing up? With a huge amount of guilt. By sleeping very, very little. By trying to do it all and probably failing at everything. But I’m a natural workaholic, and I was lucky to have a lot of very good helpers. Being a restaurant critic was actually good too. Because I had to go out to dinner every night, I would leave the office at two, pick Nick up from school, and spend the afternoon with him. So I was also lucky in that when he was really young, I didn’t have a corporate job. Then, when he was 10 and started saying, “Why don’t we ever have family dinner?,” I went to Gourmet, and I got religious about coming home to cook every night, which just required planning ahead on weekends to get the food into the house so that I could get dinner on the table quickly. You’re known as not only the last editor of Gourmet but also the one who modernized it, winning lots of awards in the process. How did you go about that? It wasn’t difficult. The magazine had been managed very much from the top down. Editors were told, “You’re going to do this, this, and this.” They literally never had a meeting. I went in and said, “Look, we have a mandate to do anything we want. What do you think we should do?” And at that first meeting, I didn’t open my mouth for three hours. What the staff wanted to do was exactly what I wanted to do, and what I think any sane person who was passionate about food in 1999 would have wanted to do. Gourmet had never gone to the farms before and talked about who was growing our food; no epicurean magazine had. Our first produce issue—which became quite famous—wasn’t my idea. It was the staff’s. They were all eager to take control. And I wanted them all to feel they had a stake in the magazine, so if someone fought hard for an article I didn’t like, I would put it in anyway. I’m a very good boss for people who don’t want to be told what to do. And the people who did want to be told left pretty quickly. I think I fired one person, even though Condé Nast had told me I’d probably have to clean house. Maybe it’s because I’m a woman—I don’t know—but it never crossed my mind that I was just going to fire everyone. Instead I thought, “There’s a lot of incredible knowledge here, so let me figure out who does what, and surely we can make it work.” Besides initiative, what qualities did you look for in employees? Mostly I wanted people smarter than me in different ways: an art director who knew way more than I did about what a magazine should look like; editors with really out-there ideas; a copy editor who was the biggest nitpicker on earth. I wanted people who were very good at one thing, and I wanted to empower them. There’s a scene in your new book when the fictional magazine Delicious! is shut down. I assume the details are drawn from your experience at Gourmet . How did you and your staff react in real life? I’ve been at a lot of places that have closed. Anybody in print has. And Gilt Taste closed too, so I have a lot of experience with this. It’s never different: Even if you should have seen it coming, you never do, and then the staff spends the night crying and drinking together. Looking back, is there anything you wish you’d done differently? I would have managed up better. I would have spent more time making friends with the corporate people at the top. It was stupid of me not to have done that. But the things people cited as the reasons Gourmet closed—we were too ambitious, we stretched too far or pushed the envelope too much—I wouldn’t change one bit. To me, working is about trying to do the best you can. I would not go back and make a less good or a less passionate magazine. I just wouldn’t. Let’s talk about culture. In your memoir Garlic and Sapphires, you make some reference to the buttoned-up culture of the New York Times. Condé Nast is said to have a very distinct corporate culture. And then you went to Gilt, which I’m sure had a much different, more commercial, tech-focused vibe. So how do you navigate these strong cultures? I don’t know if I should say this, but for me, the real secret to dealing with corporate culture is to always have another iron in the fire. One of the reasons I’ve written books is that I felt as if I was a visitor in those cultures. I was fascinated by them and a really hard worker, but I can’t not be who I am, so I didn’t ever fit perfectly. And if it didn’t work out, I’d better have something else I could do. Gilt Taste made a virtue of blending editorial and commercial, which many journalistic organizations oppose. What’s your view now? With newspapers—when I was a critic, at least—there was an absolute fire wall. With magazines, the wall is really a myth; it’s coming down, down, down all the time. So I loved being at Gilt, where you didn’t have to pretend. It felt honest to say, “We are journalism that’s based on commerce,” because, in fact, magazines are too. There were many times at Gourmet when my publisher would come to me and say, “You know, everybody else in the building says this is OK.” And I would say, “No, it’s not OK. I won’t do it.” You can do that. But you can’t do it over and over and over again. After Gilt Taste closed, you decided it was time to try fiction. How was that process different from memoir writing? I’ve been doing journalism for 45 years, so nonfiction is easy for me: You get in the shower, think about the story, and decide how you’re going to approach it, but your characters and the facts are given. With fiction, it’s a matter of patience. You just have to sit and wait for it. On a really good day, it’s like magic: You vanish for a few hours, and when you come back, there are words on the page. But you’re not really in control of the characters, so they often do things you didn’t anticipate, and then you’ve got to go back and fix what went before. Book writing is obviously very solitary, magazines very collaborative. Which do you prefer? I like them both. There’s exhilaration in the magazine process, when three or four people get together and suddenly have an idea, and you all rush off to do it. But it’s very much the same feeling when you come back from those few hours of writing and look down at the page, and it’s good. They’re similar drugs—of creativity. You’ve talked about “the healing power of work.” What do you mean by that? Nothing feels so good to human beings as having done something well. We are wired to want to accomplish things. And it doesn’t have to be complicated. I mean, when I was working at a restaurant, it was just busing faster than anyone else. I feel very fortunate that I was raised by a father who adored his work. I saw how much he got from doing it well, and it’s always been something I wanted to do. In your time as a critic, often dining in disguise, you learned that lots of restaurants don’t do customer service well. What’s the key for businesses that want to get it right? Too many businesses don’t really understand that the core of their business is making people feel good. Whether it’s walking into a store or a restaurant, or being on an airplane, most people go through life hoping that good things will happen to them, and they return to businesses that make those things happen. Circling back to your career choices, how did you know when a dramatic move you were making was the right one? I always thought they were the wrong ones. When I was offered Gourmet, I told one of my adopted mothers, “It’s just not the right time. If it were a year down the road, I would do it.” And she looked at me and said, “Ruth, it’s never the right time.” It’s the best advice I’ve ever gotten. It’s the things that scare you the most that you have to do. That’s not always easy in practice, though. How do you force yourself to take those leaps? You look down the road 10 or 15 years and say, “Do I really still want to be doing what I’m doing? Don’t I want to be challenged?” One of the secrets to staying young is to always do things you don’t know how to do, to keep learning. What else have you learned from your mentors? My first boss, Rosalie Wright, at New West magazine, was a real role model for me in how to be a boss. She was one of those fantastic woman managers: She was extremely forthright and good at what she did, and thought nothing of answering her own phone. And M.F.K. Fisher once wonderfully told me that it was time for me to work at a newspaper, because I was polishing every word and I needed to have the experience of knowing that the next day, people would be wrapping fish in whatever I was writing.

Life’s Work: An Interview with Ruth Reichl

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