A Tribute To Molly O'Neill, And What She Taught Me About Wine Writing

Note: Molly O'Neill passed away last Sunday at her home in Manhattan, at age 66. She was a food columnist for the New York Times and other publications, a chef and restaurateur, a best-selling author, and a two-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize. She was also a mentor and role model, for myself and a generation of writers who wanted to write with significance.

Molly O’Neill didn’t write about wine. But she taught me how to write about wine.

She taught me how to write, period.

O’Neill didn’t sit down and teach me about ledes or sentence construction or how to capture the nugget of a story. But she modeled all of those things in her writing, which I read and deconstructed and put back together again the way others take engines apart and put them back together too.

To see how it works. The mechanics of it, of course, but also what makes one piece of writing hum along so much more smoothly than another.

More importantly though, Molly O’Neill taught me how to be a writer in the world. She modeled that too, and it was very much how I also wanted to live my life as a writer.

“A good piece of food writing is very intimate,” I heard her say to an audience of food writers in Boston about 15 years ago. “It makes you hungry. It’s tactile. It’s grounded in the present. Stay right there, stay with the creatureliness of the food. Make people aware of being human.”

As I read it today, O’Neill’s advice echoes with significance since it was imprinted and filed under the “How to write well, no matter what” section in the mind of a younger writer. It was also printed, literally, on the inside front cover of my notebooks from those days.

Today I would swap “wine” for “food,” but the essence and the message are the same. I want my writing about wine to be very intimate, to make readers hungry, to be tactile and grounded in the present. I want to stay with the creatureliness of wine, and to make people aware of being human.

O’Neill’s advice provided structure to the young writer I was, the way a wire cage provides structure to a tomato plant or a trellis provides structure to a grape vine. We curl around it as we grow, testing our own strengths yet relying on the support of wiser, sturdier, better-established frameworks.

Back then I was working in restaurants and interning at COPIA: The American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts in Napa, when it was in its original format. I helped to organize a conference where O’Neill was a cornerstone of the speaker lineup, and that’s when I came to know her personally.

Her general advice to food writers became direct advice, as O’Neill guided me through formulating story ideas and crafting a pitch to editors about a column called “500 Words and a Recipe.”

“All are good ideas,” she wrote in response to one of my very earnest emails. “None are stories. There is a difference and I’d like to show you what that is.”

Which she did. The pitch, and naturally the stories themselves, were exponentially better because of it.

Since I learned of her death last week, I’ve been revisiting O’Neill’s emails, her advice and her writing, most notably a seminal article she wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review in 2003 called “Food Porn.” It remains a landmark on every syllabus I’ve ever created, whether the course I'm teaching is about writing and narrative or business and ethics.

Now that she’s gone, re-reading O’Neill’s work feels somehow like a reckoning. It’s an opportunity to pause and take stock of the kind of the writing I’m creating, to kick the tires so to speak on whether it lives up to O’Neill’s standards that I originally found so inspiring.

Here are four of the most salient lessons I learned from O’Neill, that still inspire me today.

Writing is a communal act, and we all have influences that shape our style, that we borrow and lend and learn from. In that way, Molly O’Neill was my teacher, librarian, sangha, mentor and role model. I miss her.

Source: Forbes.com

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