A Conversation with Kate Lebo

CMarie Fuhrman talks with the author of The Book of Difficult Fruit

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021
Hardcover : $28.00

CMarie Fuhrman: Congratulations on your new book, Kate! It is such an accomplishment and so filled with information that makes it part field guide, part natural history, part memoir, and part cookbook. What came together for you to decide to write the book in this way? Was this a form that came out of revision, or one you conceived before the book began?

Kate Lebo: Yes! No. Probably? It’s been so long, with so many drafts, I can’t remember. I remember early on wanting to weave personal story with research and reporting. I remember that, along the way, I started to think about this weave as a way to include many ways of knowing within my text. I wanted to capture all different ways one might approach each fruit, but I also needed to contain the insecurity that flared up each time I started a new chapter—that I knew nothing, that as I researched and discovered what I didn’t know, I knew even less. This not-knowing felt important to me. It felt like a stance. A way to maintain the amateur’s curiosity and wonder and openness to my subjects, and a way to turn moments where I lacked skill or grace into new ways to understand these fruits and the stories they recall.

This weave of genres arose from how I drafted the essays, too. Unless I let myself range all over the place, grabbing from this memory or that field of study, I couldn’t write at all. I’d sit there, stuck. Writing my first drafts in this fragmented way made it possible for me to write, period. Then my job became taming that snarl into something that felt more like a web. 

What drew me to writing about fruit isn’t really sayable. It’s that feeling Janie has under the pear tree in Their Eyes Were Watching God, or the view of the orchard from Ruth’s house in Housekeeping, or the sound of roots and shoots in Roethke, or the way things feel intensely possible when I open a cookbook. 

CF: Many of the fruits in your book can be found and harvested in the High Desert.  How has growing and living here shaped your tastes?

KL: I grew up in Vancouver, WA where the climate is great for berries and orchard fruits. I took this plenty for granted, and didn’t know until I started baking pie all over the country how very difficult it is to get great local fruit almost anywhere else. The way fruit trees and berries were facts of my suburban landscape makes them seem extra miraculous now—that instead of another row of sterile arbor vitae, my family had blueberry bushes. The constructed world of my hometown—I mean the parts humans made—were not particularly beautiful. To have these fruiting plants make their offerings within what felt like a very tame environment, to grow up in a constructed West where plants offer their fruit to subdivision and forest alike—that stuck with me. 

I didn’t discover native fruits or wild fruits until I was an adult. Everything came from a store, from a farm, or from our yard. Writing this book helped me break out of that circumscribed understanding.

CF: We've talked a bit about how we, both you and I as well as others, are striving to get back to the Garden. The original Garden.  And it has been said that Eve did not bite an apple, but indeed a quince, depending on where Eden was located.  Your title refers to difficult not forbidden fruits, but I wonder what fruit you would offer Eve, or what fruit you may beg her not to sample?

KL: Oh, she should eat them all! All fruits want animals to eat them, right? That’s part of our partnership with plants—to be nourished by them and, through eating them, to spread those seeds around. I would offer Eve a basket of all the fruits that have been called the fruit of knowledge. It would include quince, apples, pomegranates, citrons. I’d include an apricot, too, just for fun, since it has the most delicious and dangerous kernel—that sweetness and poison in perfect balance. 

CF: I have this desire to start a book and cooking club after reading The Book of Difficult Fruit. We would read one or two chapters, each member would make a recipe, and then come together to share the food and the stories.  I'm not sure though if we should eat first or discuss the stories until none of us could bear waiting any longer.  Which was it for you?  Did you build the story around the recipe, or pair the recipe to the story?

KL: The recipes always arose from the stories. I think of them as illustrations of the stories. And as a way to return the fruits back into fruits. I start with actual fruit, study it, eat it. Then, by writing about it, I transform the fruit into a metaphor. The recipes bring the fruits back down to earth. Make them their literal selves again. The recipes are another "way of knowing" that’s built into the book. One that’s not literary, but is just as important. You make a recipe with your body. You get out of your chair, go to the kitchen, do physical things. When I cook, my mind goes still even as my hands are very busy. That quietude—I hoped to build that into the book in a couple ways. The recipes are perhaps the fastest route to that sort of quiet.

CF: Since we cannot attend these gatherings quite yet, are you offering any online readings that you would like to share with our readers, that we might cook at home and listen to as we eat? (Publication is likely May 10 or so.)

KL: Yes! I’m going to read with Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood, for Auntie’s Books on May 20. There may be something else to report by press time. I’ll let you know if there is. 

CF: Thank you!

Kate Lebo’s first collection of essays, The Book of Difficult Fruit, is out now from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US and from Picador in the UK. Other recent work includes the chapbook Seven Prayers to Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Entre Rios Books) and the anthology Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze (Sasquatch Books), which she edited with Samuel Ligon. Her essay about listening through hearing loss, “The Loudproof Room,” originally published in New England Review, was anthologized in Best American Essays.

She is also the author of Pie School: Lessons in Fruit, Flour & Butter (Sasquatch Books) and the poetry/ephemera/recipe collection A Commonplace Book of Pie (Chin Music Press). Her poems and essays have appeared in This is the Place: Women Writing About Home, Ghosts of Seattle Past, Best New Poets, Gettysburg Review, Willow Springs, The Inlander, and Poetry Northwest, among other places.

A graduate of the University of Washington’s MFA program and Western Washington University, she’s the recipient of a Nelson Bentley Fellowship and a Joan Grayston Poetry Prize, and grants from Spokane Arts and Artist Trust. Through the Arts Heritage Apprenticeship Program from the Washington Center for Cultural Traditions, she is an apprenticed cheesemaker to Lora Lea Misterly of Quillisascut Farm.

She lives in Spokane, Washington.