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Table Conversations: Kathleen Flinn
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Published: November 13, 2007
If life were a movie, Kathleen Flinn's biopic would end with her gliding through Paris along the Seine River sipping champagne while nestled in the crook of her beloved Mike's shoulder. They fade into the glistening skyline of the City of Lights. Roll credits. The end.
But the world doesn't work that way. Flinn, a onetime reporter for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune who currently lives in Seattle, knows that now.
It was only four years ago that she was working as an executive for Microsoft in London. She hated the soul-sucking job but was fired before she could leave. Her boyfriend — remember Mike? — urged her to cash in her assets and pursue a dream that even she had forgotten she'd had: to study at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris.
There were, of course, many obstacles.
She does not speak fluent French. The most cooking she has done has been to duplicate recipes from Gourmet magazine for dinner parties. Following the dream will drain her bank account. Her nerves will be tested by screaming chefs, tedious work in steaming-hot kitchens and recipes that fail miserably.
The story of what happened next is the crux of her new book, "The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry" (Viking, $24.95). Much of the book was written at her vacation home on Anna Maria Island.
Does the story end happily? It's bad luck to give away such things. We'll say only this: She and Mike married in 2004. And there are talks of making the book into a film.
Flinn sat down to talk about the book recently during a promotional tour through Tampa.
The theme that seems to resonate with people who have reviewed the book is the idea of reinvention and the fact you can get to an advanced state of one career, chuck it and take a risk.
I think it appeals on a lot of levels. For some people, it's a story of living in Paris, and for some people, it's a story of culinary school because a lot of people have this fixation with the glamorization of food. And there's also the love story. Some people are just a sucker for that. But fundamentally I think the heart of the book is about identity.
What was that lightning bolt moment when you realized, "This is a new beginning?"
I have a couple answers for that. First, I think I realized I changed my life the day I made cassoulet in school because I had overcome barriers I had probably put in my own path in school. I felt confident, I was starting to cook really well, and it was this beautiful day in Paris. It was sort of like the opening of a movie.
It wasn't like you were in Omaha. Making a cassoulet in Omaha is a very different experience.
[laughs] I did have my cassoulet in a Ziploc, but I was sitting on the bus and I had my Audrey Hepburn sunglasses on and I had one of my very last indulgences: I bought a Chanel lipstick.
How many francs was that?
I can't remember. That was probably, like, 17 euros, though. Which is a lot when you're unemployed, you know.
That's dinner when you're unemployed.
Yeah. So, I had on my Chanel lipstick, my Audrey Hepburn sunglasses, and I had my cassoulet in my Ziploc bag and I was sitting on the bus and I remember watching [the market village of] St-Germain-des-Prés go by and it was this beautiful day. It was the first day of summer. I think I talked about it as if that summer was hanging like it was a ripe piece of fruit that was about to fall off. That's how it felt.
I remember going across the Seine River and there's the Louvre and the sun was flickering and it was this beautiful moment and I realized, "I could be sitting in my cubicle in London at a job I hate." Instead, I had somehow managed to get to Paris and be at Le Cordon Bleu and go home to someone I'm desperately in love with.
Originally I wrote the prologue of the book about that day. It was called "Cassoulet in May," and it was all fabulous; I had my fabulous life, and I was going home to my fabulous boyfriend with my fabulous cassoulet. I actually had that as the sample chapter in my proposal. It was the proposal that 10 publishers wanted to buy, the one that went to auction that Viking pre-empted.
I thought it was a great chapter and a great prologue until I put the first four chapters together. I sent it to my editor and he said, "Oh, this won't work because everybody knows it works out." So I actually opened the book with the chef yelling at me. That's how it ended up in the front of the book.
What about you changed by going through cooking school that you hadn't anticipated?
I think I learned a lot about discipline, and I learned a lot about habits. Everyone says, "Oh, what's the most important thing you learned?" You can say knife skills or that I learned to sauté …
Well, this might not have even been the most important thing …
Something small like … When I went to Le Cordon Bleu, I thought it would be really glamorous and that it would be like the 1954 film "Sabrina" with Audrey Hepburn. I thought I would be more fabulous like Audrey Hepburn, although I was probably a lot more like her in that in the movie because she was a bit of a screw-up.
I realized that despite all the fabulous dinner parties I had thrown, and no matter how many times I had made the recipe from the cover of Gourmet magazine, I really didn't know what I was doing when it came to that kind of level of professional cooking. I didn't even know how to hold a knife properly or how to cut vegetables properly.
That sounds like such a small thing to people who have never done it, but it's massive. It can make all the difference.
Yeah. And when I wrote the book, I actually wrote the last chapter first of what's really in the book. It's about the final exam, and I realized after I sat down a couple months after the exam to write the book how effortless some things had come to me. Like, how in the beginning it took me half an hour to chop my mirepoix and do it properly, and in the end, I'm just like [snaps her fingers] flying through it because you have to learn to do the basic things quickly and well and properly. They just make you do it over and over again.
That meat-stuffed meat? We just kept boning meat and stuffing it with more meat, and at the time, I couldn't see why we were doing that. Now I do. Now, I can bone a turkey [snaps her fingers], no problem. I've done it a couple Thanksgivings in a row now.
Nothing seems too insurmountable now. Big things don't seem insurmountable when you can do the small things right.
Reporter Jeff Houck can be reached at (813) 259-7324 or jhouck@tampatrib.com. Keyword: Stew, to listen to the rest of this Table Conversations podcast interview.
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