Who Is Rachel Hutton?

NOTE: This post originally appeared with a photo that Rachel Hutton herself asked me to remove — in a very nice note that said in part "I realize it’s impossible to stay anonymous. . . .but I spent all last week pulling as many images as possible off the S&S [Simon & Schuster] and BTM [Before the Mortgage] sites." I was happy to do so.  AB

If you haven’t heard, Rachel Hutton is the new food writing star for City Pages. And it’s about time she got her own gig.

Back when I was working for Minnesota Monthly as their food and feature writer, Rachel was an associate editor — and a whip-smart devotee of local restaurants. To be honest, she did most of the grunt work for our food section: keeping the listings and calendars up-to-date, writing short "Quick Bite" reviews, and reading my copy with an eagle eye. I was perennially distracted and lost in language; she (a Stanford-trained engineer who decided after graduation that she didn’t want to spend her life designing widgets) offered much-needed common sense.

In late 2005, my first novel came out. It was a weird experience, frankly. . . .like giving birth to a little literary baby and being graded on the effort in newspapers ranging from the Strib to the Washington Post. Kirkus liked the book but didn’t give it a star; People had a piece on me slated that was canned [mysteriously] at the last minute. I got entirely caught up — forgot (for the first time in my life) to pay my property taxes — and went maybe four or five nights without sleep. That’s when Steve Fox, the publisher of MN Monthly, decided in a surge of Friday afternoon gallantry to throw a party for me. He went to Barnes and Noble and bought a copy of my novel for everyone in the office, ordered a case of wine, and asked me to inscribe the books while people mingled and drank.

Here’s the thing: Not only was I exhausted, I’m also more than a tad agnosiac. But I’d never told a soul.

Clinical prosopagnosia is a condition that makes it genuinely impossible for the brain to recognize a human face. Ears, eyes, nose, and mouth all appear, but they fail to fall into a pattern that provokes a memory. Oliver Sacks wrote a terrific essay about one sufferer called The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, which appeared in a book of the same name.

But the point here is that I do not mistake people for hats, and there are some people I recognize. What I am is just sort of foggy on visual details, particularly when it comes to appearance. I rarely understand, for instance, the men other women find attractive (personally, I far prefer Harvey Keitel to George Clooney). And if one of my students cuts her hair or trades her glasses for contact lenses, I’ll certainly need to be re-introduced.

It’s worth noting, too, the I’m the mother of an autistic son and it’s common for the parents of people with autism to have "shadow" neurological differences, such as agnosia, synesthesia, and a heightened sense of smell. I’m three for three.

In any case, I finally found Rachel and confessed my problem. I’d been at MN Monthly for a year and a half but recognized only a handful of the 50 or so people who worked there. I could pick out everyone on our immediate staff, the receptionist, the director of sales, and one of the custom publishing people who had a very distinctive voice. With the other 42 or so, I was screwed.

Rachel immediately (and unfussily) devised a plan. She would stand next to me with a list, open the books one by one and clue me in whenever I froze. "Here’s a copy for Jill," she would say. Or, "Don’t forget, Maryanne has an "e" on the end of her name."

It was a kindness I’ll never forget. And it was representative of her extraordinary good nature. When I left MN Monthly and Fox did not (as he had suggested he might) hire a celebrity chef or a well-known foodie to take my place, I assumed Rachel would get the job. However, though she DID the job, she never assumed the title.

Several weeks ago, when it was announced that Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl was taking over as the premier food writer at MN Monthly, I have to say I felt a twinge of dissatisfaction. I like Dara very much and I it goes without saying she’s a knockout writer, but Rachel had put in years of really solid work and there was a big part of me that felt the job should have been hers.

So I was delighted to find that in one of those inside-baseball sort of trades, Rachel Hutton is moving from MN Monthly to take over Dara’s post at CP.

OK, she’s not the powerhouse the mighty Moskowitz can be. But Rachel is a hell of an up-and-coming writer, and she’s an incredibly sweet person besides. She’s the one on the left above — and I wouldn’t out her if she were anonymous but her images are readily Googleable because about a year after my book came out with Simon & Schuster, Rachel co-wrote and edited one of her own, Before The Mortgage, with the very same publisher.

I attended her first reading and publication party. But I’m happy to say, Rachel recognized everyone there, all on her own. And without a bit of prompting, she inscribed a book for me.