Editor’s Note: Bestselling author Ruth Reichl is the editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine and the author of the bestsellers Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me with Apples. She has been the restaurant critic at The New York Times and the food editor at the Los Angeles Times. She recently spoke with wOw’s Julia Reed about her new book, Not Becoming My Mother; why she’s grateful in spite of her dysfunctional upbringing; where she loves to eat these days and more.

JULIA REED: I really loved your book. And I had no idea what to expect. Since the title is Not Becoming My Mother, I was thinking it might be one long complaint, in which you bitch about every slight you’ve ever received — the book we could all write.

RUTH REICHL: Well, I sort of feel like I have done a little bit of that in that past.

JULIA: Well this, I thought, was an extraordinarily generous, loving and ultimately useful book.

RUTH: I hope so. One of the things that has been really heartening is getting notes from people saying, you know, “I read your book and then I called my mother.”

JULIA: I was going to get to that but let’s talk about it now. There are a lot of bittersweet moments in this book, but one of the most bittersweet is that you came to discover all these things about your mother after she was dead, on what would have been her 100th birthday, when you finally opened the box with all her papers and letters. You must have regrets about the fact that you didn’t get to pick up the phone and call your own mother.

RUTH: Oh, it feels awful to discover that she was so giving, so generous to me, and that I didn’t know all of these things. And now, not to be able to thank her just breaks my heart.

JULIA: I would imagine it must have been at least a little cathartic to be able to thank her in this way.

RUTH: Yes, it feels good. I think we all want to be seen, and I think my mother would have loved that not only did I see her, but that I showed her to the world. And the fact that I know that this would have given her pleasure gives me pleasure. Still, it would give me a lot more pleasure if she were still alive and here to actually bask in the glory of being her.

JULIA: Let’s go back a little for the benefit of those folks who are going to be reading this and have not yet read the book. In your previous books you have shared what you call the Mim Tales, which is also the title of the first chapter here. They are stories from your childhood featuring your increasingly desperate and unhappy mom as an almost comic character. An example is the party your parents gave where you had to run around trying to keep the guests from being literally poisoned by your mother’s culinary efforts. As funny and wacky as they are in the telling, they must also have been extraordinarily stressful for you. But in this book you are able to get to the roots of the Mim Tales, by reading your mother’s own scribbled notes, all these scribbled pieces of paper that you found of hers, including the one you felt was a sign that you should keep going with the project, a note reading: “Who am I? What do I want? Why do I stand in my own way so often?” You write that she was an example of everything you didn’t want to be – and if you took that out of context it would be like, “Oh, my mother was so horrid I didn’t want to be her.” Explain what you mean by that, because it’s a much more generous and broader statement than it sounds.