INTERVIEW: Bonny Reichert, Author of How to Share An Egg

Interviewed by Amy Fish

Bonny Reichert is a National Magazine Award winning journalist, a chef, and a debut memoirist. Her memoir, How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love and Plenty, won the Dave Greber Award for social justice writing in 2022, and was published in January by Appetite Random House in Canada, and Ballantine Random House in the US.

(First, Bonny and I had a little schmooze because we graduated from the same MFA a year apart and we sort of know each other so we wanted to catch up, here’s a snippet:)

Amy: How was your book launch? It looked good.

Bonny: So my launch, my first launch, was private. It was just friends and family. Oh, it was at a venue. I made a real party, but just like, you know, a friends and family party and then that was in January, and then I had a public event at Koffler Arts [in Toronto]. And that went really well. There was a snowstorm that night, but still, we got a lot of people. And then I did a couple of other events early on and some good media. And then I was in California, so I did an event at Zibby [Zibby’s Bookshop in Santa Monica, CA]. It was good, yeah. Again, I’ve had like crazy weather. My launch, it was minus 30.

My second launch was a snowstorm. Zibby was a crazy rainstorm. Maybe it’s good luck, but yeah, people came anyway, right? And then, you know, I was in Montreal and that was wonderful. I was really touched by the number of people, because my sister in law lives there, and she brought out, you know, like, maybe six, seven people, but all the rest were from the Holocaust Museum. And that was really nice. And then last night, I had this Biblio Bash here at the Toronto Library that’s a public library fundraiser, and that wasn’t my event, but I was there as an author, and that was good. It was, truthfully, you, I think you’re probably a lot more extroverted than me. You’re an extrovert, right?

Amy: Off the chart, extrovert.

Bonny: Yeah, right. So for me, it was, it was fun, but it was tiring. It was, yeah, it was hard work. You know, you get put at a table with people who know each other and you’re the stranger but it was fun. I talked to John Irving for a long time. And he talked about his new book, which was really cool, and a couple other conversations like that. It’s been very interesting. And I’ve got a little event at my shul [Congregation Habonim Synagogue of Toronto] tonight which is nice.

Amy: That’s so great.

(Then we moved to official questions I had prepared)

Amy: So Hippocampus Magazine is a magazine for writers. Our readers are mostly writers, and we always want to know about your journey to publication.

Bonny: I love to talk about that.

Amy: So tell us, how did this book get from being an idea you had, to a book that we could hold in our hands?

Bonny: When I was a child, my dad used to say to me, “one day you’ll write my story, one day, you’ll write my story.” He’s a Holocaust survivor and he’s 94 now. He’s still with us, and he’s just an incredible human being. And I wanted nothing more than to write his story and it was an honor, right? I have three older sisters, and I felt chosen, and I was the writer in the family, and I felt wonderful, but I was terrified. I knew what had happened to him, and I knew some specific stories, but I knew enough to know that I didn’t know everything. And if I were to put myself inside of everything, I would never sleep again. I already had nightmares. I had a built in fear.

The years went by, and my dad would say to me, every once in a while, “when are we going to start the book? Let’s start the book.” And I’d say, “yeah, yeah, dad, sure. As soon as I get a chance.” First, I had babies, I was busy at work. There was always a reason to put it off. It didn’t even occur to me to say, “Dad, I don’t think I can write this book. It happens inside the book, but, you know, earlier on it didn’t occur to me.”

I had never been to Poland, and I had never planned to go to Poland. My dad had always said “I suffered enough. You don’t have to suffer. I don’t want you to go.” And I was very happy to be forbidden from going, you know, to be protected like that. Things changed when in 2016, relatives in Israel told my dad that there was a family tomb in Warsaw.

This was very surprising, because my dad came from a town near Lodz and not Warsaw, and most of his family was murdered in the Holocaust. So to hear that there was a family tomb, it was kind of vague whose tomb it was, but there’s a family tomb of an important ancestor, and all of a sudden my dad says, “We’re going to Poland. I changed my mind, we’re going.” And one of my sisters said, “Yeah, I’ll go.” And the other two couldn’t go, and my dad said to me, “I want you to come.”

And as I write in the book, I did not want to go, but my dad said, “I want you to come.” And I wrote, he’s just not someone you say no to. There might be things that I wouldn’t do for him, but I don’t know what they are. So, very begrudgingly, I went and we found the tomb. The tomb was actually his grandfather’s tomb, his own grandfather, and that’s why it was his namesake. That’s why it was his name on the tomb.

Amy: Because that’s who he was named for?

Bonny: Exactly.

(Note: Eastern European Jewish tradition is to name your child after a relative who has passed away, so it is common to have grandchildren bear the names of grandparents that they have never met).

Bonny: His mother was from Warsaw. She went to a town to get married. And we just never thought that we had roots in Warsaw. So my dad finds the tomb, and we have this incredible moment where, yes, he reads his own name on the tomb, and it’s beautiful. And then I’m like, Great, let’s go home. And it was, it was just a three or four day trip, and leaving the cemetery, we were all very hungry, and we stopped for lunch. It was mid afternoon, and Warsaw is one of those cities in Europe where things really close down between lunch and dinner, and it was hard to find a restaurant. We had a guide with us, and she said, “Here, we’ll just go here.” And it was this dubious looking restaurant. The air is blue with smoke, and there’s no one in there, and we own restaurants. That was my father’s business, our family business, and you don’t eat in empty restaurants. That was our rule. But my dad, who is sort of on another planet from this experience, says “This is wonderful. Let’s sit down and eat.”

The guide, our guide, Eva orders, and I think it’s just going to be the worst food in the world. And what comes out is this beautiful borscht, clear and cool and honest and simple with these beautiful garnishes. And sitting in that restaurant, I realized that there was maybe a way into the story that I needed to tell, not the way that my dad would have me tell it, but my own way, and that was through food. So that was the beginning of the journey. I didn’t come home and start writing, but I came home and I started thinking differently. And not long after, within the year, I went back to Poland, and I did the full ghettos, concentration camps, the full immersion in, you know, the terror of the Holocaust, which is very difficult. But I came home and I knew that I had found my way in.

Amy: And then what happened?

Bonny: The second trip really changed things for me. I came home exhausted and at first very beaten up, and then I started to feel an opening in a cloud that I had been living under. I mean, it sounds like a cliche, but I didn’t even know how much I was suffering from, what you would call intergenerational trauma, I guess. And it started to shift, you know, because I faced the thing I was afraid of. And then I started. I started to work. I wrote some fiction, actually, I wrote some stories.

It didn’t really start to turn into this book, How to Share an Egg, until I enrolled in the MFA, and I needed a project, the Kings MFA [University of King’s College, Halifax], where we met. And at first I had a completely different idea, even my first submission was completely different. I didn’t want to write about myself, you know, I’m trained as a journalist. And I had the belief that I’m not interesting and that it’s self centered to write about yourself, a lot of nonsense. I thought, I can’t, I can’t write a whole book about myself. I knew I couldn’t write this like Holocaust biography. I knew it was me, right?

So I think, Oh, I’ll write a book about survivors, and there will be recipes from their old country, and they’ll talk about their experiences in the war, but also before the war, because I I know how much my dad loves to talk about his life before the war, and it you know, my working title was “The Holocaust Survivor Cookbook.” Needless to say, when I workshopped my first set of writing, and I think it must have been a little bit of personal writing, and then a little bit of journalism. And my group said, “Oh, this part, the personal writing, this is way better than the journalism part.” And by the time we were doing our proposals, I started to conceive the book in the form that it took.

For me, the exercise of doing the proposal was very difficult, but very important and very helpful. Again, as a magazine journalist, I think I felt a little intimidated by the openness of a whole book, and creating that structure was very helpful. I wrote a very detailed, specific book proposal including an outline. I listed specific chapters, chapter by chapter, and chapter summaries.

And when we had the January residency and we had the opportunity to practice our pitch with real agents. The first person that I was paired with said to me, after I did my pitch, “it’s a food memoir, right? Food is the organizing principle.” That’s what made me decide, you know there’s food, because my father almost starved to death, right?

Amy: It was a beautiful scene when you said he told you that when he saw the potato peels in the garbage decades after the war ended, but he saw there was potato attached to the peels, he couldn’t help it. His mouth watered. It was like his body was just programmed to.

Bonny: Yeah, it’s a flashback. Anyway, things happened after I started writing, right? Because it stirred things up, and it was fascinating and helpful, but also quite scary. What am I messing with here? The first person that I pitched to told me, If your restaurants are not famous, no one is going to buy your book. I was very discouraged, but I didn’t change anything. I went to the second meeting, you know, kind of down, and the second agent that I pitched to said to me at the end of my pitch, when your proposal is ready, I’d love to see it. And I was so excited. And I said, Oh, it’ll be ready in two weeks. And she said, Whenever it’s ready. And of course, it was six months, because she sent me a template, I had to make some adjustments because it was January, and I sent it in May. Five months later I sent it, and two days later, she called me and said, “I’d like to sign with you,”

I didn’t do a ton of research, looking at all different agents, and I just went with my gut. It just felt good. I’m not a young person, and not that I’m old, but I’m not a baby, and I might as well go for it.

She was in New York. I thought that was a really great opportunity for me. It’s such a Jewish Book, you know, and Canada has a small population. I thought that would be helpful. And we signed. And then we worked on the proposal further for another year. We kept working sample chapters, refining the outline, and then we took it out in January 2022 and we sold in Canada on proposal with multiple offers, and then in the US on proposal with multiple offers. It was always called How to Share an Egg.

When I was a child, my dad had this story about how he and his cousin, after being liberated from a barn in the German countryside, came outside, and the American army was there, and they were starving. What did they have? They only had green relish. My dad and his cousin ate this green relish – these starving boys, and promptly got sick, and they needed more food, and the army said, we can take you to a DP camp where there’s food. And my dad was like, “No, no more camps. Thank you.” And so they started to just roam the countryside looking for food, and they knocked on doors, and most of the farmers said, no, no, no. And finally, one farmer came back with one egg for the two boys. So I knew this story when I was young and when I was a teenager, and I thought, Oh, maybe I will write this book. That was the name, How to Share an Egg, and it’s been with me since then. They let me keep it so that was pretty cool.

Amy: And I love your cover. Thank you. Is there anything about the cover design to discuss? Were there multiple versions? Did you have a vision?

Bonny: There is something to discuss for writers, because all of it: the cover, the title, the subtitle, were all my original ideas. Oh, and they were all in my proposal. The cover art was art that I picked. I knew this artist. She’s a French illustrator in Paris. I knew her work, and I put a couple of pieces in my proposal. This was one of the pieces. And when they went to do the cover, they showed me a lot of options, but this was one of them, and everybody agreed that this was the best one.

You need to have a vision and to think that you are the creative director of your book, not just the writing, but the creative director of the whole thing. The mood and the tone and the colour and the marketing, you’re very good at that [Awww, she means me, Amy Fish, although I’m sure you dear reader are good as well] so I don’t have to tell you that, but you need to be the creative director a I really wanted something simple and something graphic and I didn’t want photography.

Amy: Did you think about including recipes?

Bonny: Yes, the earliest version of the book did have recipes. It evolved a lot when once my editor got involved, Sarah Weiss in New York, and the narrative propulsion picked up through editing and through writing. At one point, I realized my chapters were too long. I made them shorter. That made a big difference, as it started to become more propulsive, and the arc started to become more defined,

Sarah, and actually, my agent weighed in too. They particularly thought, and I was not sure I was open, that recipes would slow down the propulsion of the book.

Amy: You do such a great job engaging all the senses. In your descriptions, you really do a great job, especially like the smells. We kind of want to make whatever you’re describing, even the borscht and the potatoes seem delicious.

Bonny: They made me a recipe card that I hand out at events. Plus I have a Substack [field & pantry], and I just want to be a little bit careful, because I’m not sure if there might be a cookbook. I have two more projects floating around in here, but I’m just not sure what’s going to happen.

Amy: Are they food related? Are they both food related?

Bonny: I don’t think I can write without food, but one is fiction, okay, and one is potentially nonfiction, I guess not another memoir, that’s for sure, not because it was a terrible experience, but because memoir is very hard to sell, and getting harder all the time. And because I’ve done it.

Amy: Tell me about the decision to aggregate your sisters, because I was reading it, thinking, Okay, this is Julie, but she said she had four sisters. Like, where are my three other sisters?

Bonny: My sisters are a lot older than me, and they often went off somewhere big, big kids, and I was a little kid. And maybe most of all, my book is very raw and very honest and very probing, and it’s one thing to do that to yourself, but it’s very different to apply that same rigor to someone else. And I didn’t, I didn’t want to do that to them, right? It’s different with my dad, because he wanted this, but my sisters did not ask to be characters in a book. And I was not willing to gloss over things. I love them, and we have a wonderful relationship. But to make those relationships really honest and come to life, I would have had to apply a level of scrutiny that just was not part of my project. I mean, it’s a convention, it’s something people do. I first encountered it and thought it worked on between gods by Allison Pick (Penguin Random House 2015).

Amy: And how has their reception been now that it’s out?

Bonny: Good, yeah, great. They’re very proud. I think,

Amy: Were there any scenes you wanted to include that got edited out? We talked about recipes, anything else?

Bonny: Recipes, I voluntarily took out. We wanted it to be a sweeping propulsive read and they were like speed bumps. Yes, in my first draft, the first third of the book was very detailed and there was a lot more. There was a scene with my best friend, this book does not have a lot of extraneous characters. There was a best friend and there was a scene where my best friend was from Dundas [in Ontario], we were in university and I was feeling displaced, I was from Edmonton, I had decided to spend the summer in Toronto and I went to her place one weekend and I came in from swimming and her mum was in the kitchen, her mum was Belgian, and she was in the kitchen making mayonnaise. And I had a very detailed scene watching her make mayonnaise and how it made me feel and how I felt connected to her.

There are a lot of surrogate mothers in the book. And that is an example of a scene, a chapter that was called mayonnaise. And it was cut. And I miss it. But you know, that first third was too long. We were very mindful of structure and pacing and it had to go. Maybe I can use it somewhere else.

Amy: I thought you treated your ex-husband or first husband very respectfully.

Bonny: Thank you.

Amy: You made it about you, you really did, and it was so well handled. As a writer reading it, I felt the surgical precision.

Bonny: A memoir is not a place to settle scores. And, thank you. I tried hard. Yes, I took out, and took out, and took out. I talked about how I felt exactly and I have no idea what I wrote that would be surprising for him. I had a conversation with him before to sort of prepare him and make sure he was OK. I said as little as possible. I wouldn’t even have included him but it was necessary for the narrative.

Amy: Right. Well, to understand Bonny’s motivation, we needed it.

Bonny: Also that it led to that rift with my father. Over the divorce, over deciding to leave which was one of the only conflicts in the whole book. It was a calculated decision. It’s not the only argument we’ve ever had, but for this book it was important right? Because it’s about a woman needing to make her own decisions and find herself even if it upsets the most important person in her life.

Amy: And, to explain the responsibility of being a child of a Holocaust Survivor.

Bonny: Of course.

Amy: Right? I mean it really brings it down, for people who don’t have the experience or the familiarity, this is granularly how it can impact your day to day life. It was masterful. Masterful, masterful Bonny.

Bonny: You’re absolutely right. I mean people still say to me “your father’s been through so much,” we completely internalize that. That’s an example, how can I talk about how my sisters feel about that? It’s so so so personal. And if I had, it would feel like bullshit to the reader. It’s not my place, you know? We’re close but this is super deep work that I did. I don’t know how they feel about this. They probably don’t know how they feel.

Amy: I wonder if you had any inspirations or people that you look up to.

Bonny: Quite recently, in the last two years, when I found that quote “for people like us” from Esther Perel. I knew that I was part of that “us.” The other person who said that, in a completely different context, was Ruth Reichl, who talked about food people and how food is identity and how you can really understand people but what they eat and how they set their table and how they handle meal time. It’s an important cultural artifact.

I think of them as my spiritual mothers, writers who came before me. And this was really, even though it reads as a book about the Holocaust, and a book about self-discovery, of course, it is. But most of all, I started with the idea that I was writing a food memoir, and the set of conventions and understandings that came from me from people like Ruth Reichl or Dorie Greenspan, or Laurie Colwin who is no longer living, or MFK Fisher, or Elizabeth David.

Amy: I get it. And then, my final question is always the same. What are you reading now? Do you have any books that you recommend to our readers?

Bonny: Ahhh, there’s so many books I could recommend. I just finished the Peggy Guggenheim book, called Peggy. I really loved it. It was great and so interesting to read like a writer that book because the author Rebecca Godfrey died before the book was finished and her friend Leslie Jamison finished it for her, had to copy her syntax and her rhythm and finish the book. I was really, really fascinated by that. I’m re-reading The Great Gatsby for something in fiction that I’m thinking about. I’ve got your book on my night table, I haven’t started it yet, but I’ve got it.

Amy: Thank you. Anything I didn’t ask you that you want to add?

Bonny: I want to tell writers: Just finish your book. Finish your book, finish your book, finish your book. It’s hard, it’s really, really hard. But nothing can happen unless you finish your book.