The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry
Love, Laughter and Tears at the World's Most Famous Cooking School
By Kathleen Flinn
Reviewed by Nancy Huang
What if, at the age of 36, you were ready to give up your entire career for the sake of following your passion for cooking? It’s a plotline heard many times over in the food world, though no one tells it quite like Kathleen Flinn in her new book, The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry. Eliminated from a lucrative job in London, Flinn decided to empty her savings account and move to Paris to enroll in the renowned Le Cordon Bleu cooking school.
The memoir chronicles Flinn’s cooking school experience as well as her adjustment to her new Parisian life. Mixing the wonderment of Julia Child with the wryness of food blogger Julie Powell, Flinn tells her story with the unique perspective of a Francophile lost in Paris, a young woman who reveres the culture as much as she is hindered by it.
As the narrative follows her journey from Basic to Intermediate to Superior Cuisine, Flinn’s descriptive, sometimes cynical style continues to captivate. Whether she's describing boning quails or cleaving the heads from rabbits, she is both comical and endearing—and surely anyone who has spent time doing dirty work in the kitchen can relate. However, in the midst of it all, Flinn devotes many unnecessary pages to her relationship with her fiancé-cum-husband Mike, a seemingly perfect man who moves to Paris to be with her. With little drama between the two of them, the gushy romance becomes excessive fat.
Mike aside, the meat and bones of the story is Flinn’s love affair with French cuisine and the French language. It becomes infectious, and readers will easily find themselves saying “Oui, Chef!” or “Merde!” out loud. Though the ending is predictable, her enthusiastic passion for all things French and all things food is what keeps us reading page after page until the very end.
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