How to Read A French Fry

by Russ Parsons (2001)

The book describes the process by which fluid fills the particles of flour, by which chopped bits of zucchini evaporate in a skillet as the oil surrounding them turns them golden brown. Sauces and pie crusts, mayonnaise and breaded fried chicken crusts—Russ Parsons takes us into the abstract world of chemistry in order to set up a chess-like strategy for maximizing the flavor in all these recipes.
A few years back I started enrolling in the prerequisite courses I needed in order to become a registered nurse. I started with psychology, anatomy and basic chemistry. I found I had a talent especially for chemistry, for drawing out the fish skeleton diagrams that describe carbohydrate chains, for understanding the Rube Goldberg contraptions of the cell membranes that drive the process of life. I fell in love with the menagerie of two-dimensional and three dimensional diagrams used to describe molecules—balls and sticks, maps of benzene rings, computer generated images of proteins coiled and fan-folded into structures that allowed them to carry out essential functions of life.
The paradox: I found myself immersed in a Wonderland of facts and specialized knowledge, cryptic terminology and brain-twisting challenges, all of which I found extremely inspirational. But at the same time, I had basically no time to write creatively.
In hindsight, I can get all sly with my former self and ask whether it was really a lack of time that was holding me back, or whether it was a faulty conception of what the prerequisites are of being able to write something.
It’s so easy as a writer to be intimidated. There are so many writers who have come before, and so many of them have succeeded by giving the impression of a deep and encyclopedic knowledge of . . . nearly everything. Herman Melville and the life of the whalers. Thomas Pynchon and the history of Germany after the Second World War. Annie Proulx and rough, homespun culture of Newfoundland. One imagines the time these authors spent researching their subjects and comes away feeling eminently unqualified. Not only do I not know anything about whaling, post-war Gemany or Newfoundland, I don’t even know as much about my own surroundings as these authors knew about their exotic subjects.
The truth is that writing isn’t like that. Since my starting point here is Russ Parsons’s book about food, let me use that as a metaphor: if you want to make and sell a food product in the USA, there’s an established bureaucracy you have to deal with. There are standards, there are rules. If you’re selling lettuce that gives people salmonella, there are investigators that will track you down. When it comes to writing, the situation is different. Certainly, your work will be judged. If you want to get published, there are standards you have to meet. But the bureaucracy your dealing with is one far more mysterious.
I think every creative person at some point becomes familiar with the idea of the “inner critic.” The inner critic is a part of your brain that moves quickly to put a kibosh on any inspiration that we’re capable of coming up with. The inner critic is infuriatingly dynamic. Every day he sits in his little mental office and gathers new examples of why you aren’t qualified to do what you want to do. If you read a good book, the critic will tell you that your work will never be that good. If you read a crummy piece of work, the critic will tell you that it bears remarkable and damning similarities to your own work. The inner critic is ingenious and sadistically cunning. One of his specialties is to take what nourishes you and turn it into something that poisons you. Take advice for instance: there’s all sorts of advice for writers floating around out there. “Show, don’t tell.” “Write the truest sentence you can.” “Avoid adverbs.” “Write what you know.”
This last bit of advice in particular can be an extremely potent medicine and can quickly turn into a potent poison. It can be amazingly liberating, a personal emancipation proclamation when you suddenly realize that you’re able to use your own experience and forget all about emulating the style of Tennessee Williams or William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett or Thomas Hardy as you’ve fruitlessly been doing for the last few years. All of a sudden, it seems like you have a new treasure trove of subject matter. For a while, the inner critic is caught off guard. But he’s nothing if not adaptive. He begins to realize the restrictive potential of this maxim. “Write what you know.” That’s as much as saying “Don’t dare write what you don’t know. Don’t dare speculate. Don’t dare imagine.” Soon the inner critic has the statement crocheted and hung upon his office wall.
It’s easy to get caught up in the despair over how much or how little you know. Some authors can come away from a dinner party with every conversation stored verbatim in their memories. Some draw on their experiences of coming from one culture to another. Some have gone to the best possible schools, trained at the feet of the brightest possible geniuses. And here you are with apparently nothing to work with. It doesn’t seem fair. It’s not fair.
But that’s part of the truth you need to write about, the fact that nothing in this world is fair. None of us knows quite enough to get by, and none of us has quite the social skills to seek the complimentary knowledge from those who surround us. The truth is that I know that I’m inspired by chemistry, and I’m inspired by politics and world history, and I’m inspired by economics and I’ll never be authoritative enough in any of these subjects to write the sort of Pulitzer-Prize winning work that I’d like to, and that doesn’t matter. If I’d wanted, I could have taken a year after my nursing school and immersed myself in chemistry in the hopes that the study would have made me into an expert, would have given me an arsenal of expertise I could draw on for the rest of my adult life as a writer. I could write a book about the lives of chemists and physicists at the turn of the 19th century. All my facts would be correct. I would describe the ways in which methyl groups freewheel at the end of carbohydrate chains; I would describe the way that scientists like JJ Thompson used every day materials to set up brilliant experiments. I would describe the incomparable feeling of being present at the moment of a revolution in human knowledge. But probably the end result would be that I would always feel I had just one more text to read before I was prepared to start writing.
Recently I heard poet Kay Ryan speaking on the radio. She said that the best way to write about something is when you know almost nothing about it. I think this is especially useful information in our current culture, which values realism, polish and an appearance of expertise. Expertise is fascinating, certainly, but if you want to be creative, you need to rely on imagination rather than expertise. Imagination is not the rational irrigation system that supplies the rational fields of expertise—it’s the swamp water that gathers in the wetlands of ignorance.
What does this have to do with the book How to Read a French Fry? Not much, I’m afraid, except to say that this odd little hybrid of a book, not quite a cookbook but not quite a science text, is emblematic of the sort of hybrid knowledge I’m talking about. You won’t come away from it an expert in either chemistry or cuisine, but it may provide you with just the sort of disorienting intellectual spin you need to get yourself back into the dizzy state you need in order to get inspired.