L.K. Rawles

I’ve been a horribly inconsistent blogger, so in penance I’ll admit something embarrassing. I spent my evening listening to Kenny G’s Christmas album while my dad taught me how to dance the foxtrot. Beat that! The only possibly way it could have been dorkier is if I’d been wearing a spangled Christmas sweater.

So I was just in Washington, D.C., with many of the women in my family. We took a tour of the White House, which was pretty cool, but kind of underwhelming. I’d heard that one of the British royals once refered to it as a “charming little cottage,” and I can’t disagree. It’s rather small and ever-so-slightly dingy.

But I suppose it befits a democratic nation for our leader’s house to be fairly humble. When I visited the Tower of London a few years ago, the crown jewels made me feel kind of ill. The sprinkling of gold trimmings in the White House were in the amateur leagues, like, “Awww! Look who’s trying to be a big powerful country!”

I couldn’t help thinking back to a cathedral in Prague, whose decorations can best be described as gold-plated gold dipped in gold with gold underpinnings in a gold wash. There were cherubs in there that were the art equivalent of a crime against humanity.

The history behind the little pink packets my grandmother used to lift from restaurants is a strange one, and Rich Cohen is a strange narrator for the story. As the disinherited grandson of Sweet ‘n Low inventors Ben and Betty Eisenstadt, “all they have left me is this story.”

The memoir follows Grandpa Ben as he invents the sugar packet (only to be screwed over by the Domino Sugar Company) then Sweet ‘n Low, weathers the anti-saccharine campaign by the FDA in the ’70s, only to be busted for mob corruption in the ’90s. Yes! Sweet ‘n Low was under federal investigation. Think about that the next time you’re sweetening your coffee. The final section of the book deals with the disinheritance of Cohen’s mother, the once-favorite daughter, for reasons that seem unclear even to the participants. “To be disinherited is to be set free,” writes Cohen.

It’s a theme he returns to several times during the book, that to be without family is to be free. To be encumbered by family is to be trapped, tied down, smothered to death by loving arms.

It’s the five-mile-walk-to-school-uphill-both ways story that your grandfather tells to make you feel weak and lazy….I sometimes think a family is no more than a collection of such stories, a chronicle that locks you down like the safety bar that crosses your lap before the roller-coaster leaves the platform, without which you would fly away in the turns.

But his memoir isn’t filled with bitterness as much as it’s filled with exasperated love for family members fantastic in their weirdness.

When I was briefing my brother-in-law on his new family and told him that [Aunt] Gladys had not left the house since the Nixon administration, he said, “You mean mostly she stays in the house but now and then she leaves the house to go to the store?” I said, “I mean mostly she stays in her room but now and then she leaves her room to go to the bathroom.”

Or his grandmother Betty:

[Her brother’s] birth taught Betty lessons she would follow for the rest of her life: that boys are better than girls, that love is finite, that love is coal, and there is a shortage, and there will never be enough to go around.

And his uncle Marvin (or, as he insisted on being called, “Marvelous”):

He said he had been prescribed a pill for fading memory, but told me he forgets to take it. He does remember that he forgets, which struck me as suspicious.

It’s also a love letter to Brooklyn. I was born without the New York City gene. It’s never been my dream to live there, nor have I ever bothered to visit friends while they were living there. The only part of NYC I’ve set foot in is the JFK airport. I spent a summer during college in Ireland with a group of NYU students, and I was left with the impression that the only topic of interest for people from New York is New York restaurants.

But a lot of Midwestern kids (especially in their high school years) have a dream, a longing, an infatuation with New York City that borders on the pathological. Rich Cohen is one of these. He was born and grew up in Illinois, but his extended family lived in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is another character, another quirky family member who helped shape the trajectory of the company. Even I grew to have some affection for it.

Verdict: 8.5 out of 10 for lyrical prose and funny-from-the-outside family drama.

It’s a dicey business to write non-fiction about people who are still alive to refute everything you’ve said about them. Cohen wrote an article on Slate.com called Just Screw It: How I told my family I was writing about our feud over the Sweet ‘n Low fortune that’s well worth a read.