The Sharper Your Knife

THE SHARPER YOUR KNIFE, THE LESS YOU CRY
by Kathleen Flinn

It’s a popular daydream: ditch the corporate job, run away to Paris, learn to cook, write a book about the experience, then have Hollywood come calling to make your story into a major motion picture starring Julia Roberts.

Kathleen Flinn, a native of Seattle, is almost there.  Tinseltown hasn’t exactly put her on their speed dial yet but her best selling book “The Sharper the Knife, The Less You Cry” (the chronicle of her life adventures while chopping and dicing her way to a degree from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris), has been featured on “Novel Adventures” a new web-based mini-series from CBS Interactive.*

To Quote:
The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry is the touching and remarkably funny account of Flinn's transformation as she moves through the school's intense program and falls deeply in love along the way. Flinn interweaves more than two dozen recipes with a unique look inside Le Cordon Bleu amid battles with demanding chefs, competitive classmates, and her "wretchedly inadequate" French. Flinn offers a vibrant portrait of Paris, one in which the sights and sounds of the city's street markets and purveyors come alive in rich detail. ?

Well, at least that’s what the publisher says. Listen to an audio clip here. [Click the green arrow under the cover photo.]

Meanwhile, Flinn, who has seen her book go into its second paperback printing, is working on her second book and frequently contributing to her blog at www.kathleenflinn.com.

Cooking may have been a skill she had to acquire but the writing, and digital marketing game is one she has been well versed in.  In her pre-culinary career, Flinn has been a freelancer for the Chicago Sun Times, an intern at Playboy magazine, the editor of Internet Underground, the restaurant producer for Sidewalk.com (before it became CitySearch), head of editorial for MSN.co in London and the producer (according to the Guinness World Book of Records) of the world’s most viewed live webcast (which starred Madonna).

But these days, between adding recipes to her blog and doing book promotion tours around North America, she teaches classes on how to break into the media business.  On March 9, Flinn will conduct an "Introduction to Food Writing Weekend" in Seattle – a 2-day intensive workshop on the fundamentals of food writing, recipe testing, restaurant reviewing and more. See details here.



Related: NPR radio interview with Kathleen Flinn.

*On Novel Adventures, four women in a book club go on adventures based on the books they are reading. After reading The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry, the women go on an epicurean adventure.