Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball
Author: Molly ONeill
Molly O'Neill's father believed that baseball was his family's destiny. He wanted to spawn enough sons for an infield, so he married the tallest woman in Columbus, Ohio. Molly came out first, but eventually her father's plan prevailed. Five boys followed in rapid succession and the youngest, Paul O'Neill, did, in fact, grow up to be the star right fielder for the New York Yankees. In Mostly True, celebrated food critic and writer O'Neill tells the story of her quintessentially American family and the places where they come together—around the table and on the ball field.
Molly's great-grandfather played on one of the earliest traveling teams in organized baseball, her grandfather played barnstorming ball, and her father pitched in the minor leagues, but after being sidelined with an injury in the war, he set his sights on the next generation. While her brothers raged and struggled to become their own men, Molly, appointed "Deputy Mom" at an age when most girls were playing with dolls, learned early how to be the model Midwestern homemaker and began casting about wildly for other possible destinies. As her mother cleaned fanatically and produced elaborate, healthy meals, Molly spoiled her bro-thers with skyscraper cakes, scribbled reams of poetry, and staged theatrical productions in the backyard. By the late 1960s, the Woodstock Nation had challenged some of the O'Neill values, but nothing altered their conviction that only remarkable achievement could save them.
Mostly True is the uncommon chronicle of a regular family pursuing the American dream and of one girl's quest to find her place in a world built for boys. Molly O'Neill—an independent,extraordinarily talented, and fiercely funny woman—showed that home runs can be hit in many fields. Her memoir is glorious.
The New York Times - Pete Wells
O'Neill's memoir reads like a comic novel. She sketches her relatives with obvious fondness, but they are clearly caricatures who serve the author's humorous whims. Her mother is drawn as an accumulation of verbal tics ("Now, I ask you!") and her father is a blustery optimist who greets everyone with a cheerful "Hey ya, whatsy!" After college, O'Neill cooked for a women's restaurant in Northampton, Mass., that served "nonviolent cuisine," and her description of her co-workers broadly satirizes the feminism of the peasant-skirt era.
Publishers Weekly
Former columnist for the New York Times and author of The New York Cookbook, O'Neill de-emphasizes the cooking element here in favor of cozy family gatherings around baseball games. Her memoir begins even before the courtship of her parents, minor leaguer "Chick" O'Neill and six-foot, convent-educated "Bootsie" Gwinn, in Columbus, Ohio, in 1945, and extends to younger brother Paul O'Neill's retirement as right-fielder for the Yankees in 2001. O'Neill meanders lovingly through years growing up as the eldest to five brothers who channeled their adolescent hormones into Little League. O'Neill records her first forays into cooking inspired by an Ohio Power and Electric Co. demonstration given for her Brownie troop; her brothers worshipped her for making dishes from Spam and processed cheese. In college, she secured jobs as a cook and took over the kitchen at Ciro's in Boston by 1979. Her cooking segued into writing, first for the Globe, then New York Newsday. By the time she became a restaurant critic for the Times in the early 1990s, younger brother Paul had been traded to the Yankees, bringing the whole unwieldy family to feast in New York. O'Neill charts a long-winded, pleasantly nostalgic trip. B&w photos. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
O'Neill's brother Paul, of Reds and Yankees fame, enchanted fans with his insightful book (with Burton Rocks), Me and My Dad: A Baseball Memoir. Here, Molly herself, former longtime food columnist for the New York Times, provides her own even richer and more textured account of the transcendant value of baseball within intertwined American lives. Filled with poignant and often rivetting anecdotes of her coming of age in Ohio with five younger brothers, her beautifully composed story is destined to be a best seller and is essential for all public libraries. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A mildly diverting memoir by New York Times food columnist O'Neill. The author recalls in remarkable detail her childhood in Columbus, Ohio, her education and apprenticeship as a chef and her career as a New York restaurant reviewer. The oldest child and only girl in the O'Neill family, she functioned as a deputy mother to her five younger brothers and learned how to feed a crowd at an early age. With lots of dialogue, she recreates "mostly true" scenes from the 1950s and '60s that feature a blue-collar father who believed that baseball was the answer to puberty's raging hormones, a socially grounded mother and a chaotic swarm of kid brothers. (Dad had trouble keeping Mike, Kevin, Pat, Robert and Paul straight, and the reader may, too.) In hopes of finding a place where girls matter as much as boys, Molly relocated in the mid-1970s to Northampton, Mass., where she started the Ain't I a Wommon Club, a restaurant serving "non-violent cuisine." Following her vegetarian/feminist/collective period, she became a cook in Cape Cod's Provincetown, studied cooking in Paris and found success as a chef and a food-and-wine columnist in Boston. Big names (Lillian Hellman, Julia Child) begin to enter her story here, and by the mid-1980s, she had moved on to New York City. Her account of preparing for the job of restaurant critic is absorbing, as is her description of performing the actual work. Various brothers drift in and out of her East Coast life, and when the youngest-Paul-makes it into the major leagues as a New York Yankee, the family returns to the fore. Although the author strains to make them colorful, they really aren't all that fascinating. What never fails to generate interest, however, isO'Neill's skill at describing food and its preparation. Tasty, feather-light entertainment.
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Author: Bridget Jones
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