11
Sarah Katherine Lewis is a size 10 former porn actress/model/dancer bisexual 35-year-old who loves meat, cooking and eating all kinds of meat. Even marrow, even guts. Loves sex. In Sex and Bacon, she combines these two loves: animal flesh for eating and human flesh for ... everything just short of actually ingesting or being ingested. Completely non-judgmental, SKL even loves Britney Spears, dedicating an entire chapter to her. She's funny. Very incorrect. She has swayed me. I had grown practically vegan and into humane farming and so monogamous I don't even look at porn any more, but her book is making me want to lick and suck bacon! And whale meat! And girls!
Seriously, this book makes me want to live. And to try out recipes that include "a glug" of olive oil, a "small chunk" of butter or bacon fat along with "leftover chunks of cooked ham, bacon, chicken, or sausage." It makes me feel good about food (instead of seeing it as a clogger of arteries, destroyer of organs, or instrument of torture for dumb creatures, or rapist of the Earth). She makes me feel hungry, and confident about my ability to create, experiment, be a great cook/hostess just as I am, to make mistakes that are fun. I think it would have to be a very loving person who would suggest that: "oregano and cumin are nice. Maybe add some chili powder. Or try a little fennel." She's really not the least bit careful.
As if this open-ended, experimentative attitude weren't encouraging enough to make the scaredy-cat go for it, SKL exhorts us to get a little drunk while cooking, and to "drunkefy" our guests. And have sex with them after we eat. In a world dedicated to making women feel they have to get it right, SKL is saying all you have to do is go ahead and get it on.
It seems to me that our greatest fear in this electronic, Lysoled era is to live. We barely even recognize it — life — any more in its unadulterated form. To live is messy; it smells. It tends to be bad for you. It's nothing like the Internet, where information is total and people never die. My theory is that life died with death. It used to be people died at home; their bodies were then dressed fancy, laid out, kissed, photographed and gazed at by a stream of visitors: a sombre party. Now we don't know what goes on. With no visible end to life, no border to it or to our bodies (our photos stay beautiful on MySpace forever), both have lost their preciousness.
Sarah Katherine Lewis author of Sex and Bacon
Related Articles
Internet Links
It's too bad they decided to put SKL's photo on the cover, because in the advanced reader copy I got, there was none, and I had to imagine. I pictured a crazed mouth, prominent nostrils and two fists roaming, grabbing, throwing things into things. Very rarely as an author does she use her eyes to see, describing instead the scent, texture, squishiness, taste, or feel, and emotion, of the thing. So I didn't picture her having eyes — more these pulsating sensor detectors. I see now that the woman is pretty, and has interesting tattoos, but no real human could compare with the sense-y entity SKL's prose conjured for me.
Sex and Bacon makes me want to shout from a rooftop. Not sure which rooftop, or what I would say. Maybe just some guttural hoots. Maybe that this book, this book is great! This book is life! This book is about sorrow, smells, meat, joy, sex — professional and non — heartache, heart burst, contentment, kindness, connection, isolation, snuggling, colonoscopes, handfuls of rosemary thrown into the pot, realizing you're a fraud, realizing you're awesome, bereavement, discovery, mistakes, the money that comes from being naked and all the exciting, semi-horrifying foods in unusual locales that can be bought with that money, budgeting when you give up being naked and try typing instead and the couple of pieces of brown thigh meat that can be bought after the rent is paid, and what you can do with that past-the-best-used-by date brown meat, one wilted potato, dried beans and Tabasco.
Also like life, the book is non-cohesive. I guess you could say it's not well-done. She didn't follow the recipe right. Our author starts off gangbusters in different directions, falls back, then completely falls apart somewhere around page 200. Her boyfriend leaves her and she turns out to not be so free and roaming and lusty as she thought. As we thought. She is doubtful and poor and fat. She is human.
Not so many of us are any more. Human, that is. SKL's an explorer, and whether she's using the "tiny, long-handled meat coke-spoon" to reach excitedly into the upright femur bone to dig out marrow to slurp, or diving deep into a wanna-die, my-baby-done-left-me blues, SKL goes all the way down.
Lisa Carver lives in New Hampshire with two children, one man, one cat, two African clawed frogs, one hermit crab and one shrimp. Her latest book is Drugs are Nice
