Concerning Breakfast
SelectsIt’s the first thing you learn as a radio reporter. Check your levels by asking an interview subject the question “what did you have for breakfast?” It’s disarming. But it’s also revealing.
Annie Cheney uses the question like a sculptor in Concerning Breakfast, establishing the contours of a documentary about food, eating, family, and friendship. With an alarmingly precise answer to the question, we’re introduced to Vivienne, with whom Cheney shared a hospital room in an eating disorder clinic at the age of 15. We hear from her mother (half a croissant, toasted, with peach jam) about the day she admitted Cheney to the clinic and the suicide attempt that preceded it. Cheney speaks with her father (blueberry muffin, fruit) and brother (eggs, toast, fruit) while weaving in her own experience with Vivienne at the clinic.
Together they create a portrait of a family blinded by its own lore, a young girl defiantly seeking attention through starvation, and a community of women that helped her come back from the edge. Listeners sit with the uncomfortable realities of a journalist investigating what really happened during an experience everyone but her wants to forget. The portrait Cheney delivers is tough to hear. She expertly places tape of her mother describing their complex breakfast tablescape with the details of various patients’ rules for eating at the clinic. Vivienne offers a terrifyingly memorable character - someone walking a fine line between life and death and from whom you cannot turn away. Throughout the piece we hear Cheney playing piano, a specific song from her anorectic period, transforming each musical interstitial into its own piece of narration. Concerning Breakfast is a forceful memoir that scrapes at the veneer of audio reportage.
Cheney’s co-producer, Jay Allison, is a pioneer of the medium who has trained many iconic audio journalists. His studio, Atlantic Public Media, alongside the team at Transom, represent a school of sound that emanates from Cape Cod and has become a standard for narrative audio across the medium. Here, Cheney and Allison achieve a game of sonic chess, strategically unpacking family grief and delivering this story in a way that leaves listeners unsure of which way is forward. But that’s the true nature of a personal story, and the reason Concerning Breakfast remains at the forefront of the creative conversation some 25 years from its initial airing.
It’s the first thing you learn as a radio reporter. Check your levels by asking an interview subject the question “what did you have for breakfast?” It’s disarming. But it’s also revealing.
Annie Cheney uses the question like a sculptor in Concerning Breakfast, establishing the contours of a documentary about food, eating, family, and friendship. With an alarmingly precise answer to the question, we’re introduced to Vivienne, with whom Cheney shared a hospital room in an eating disorder clinic at the age of 15. We hear from her mother (half a croissant, toasted, with peach jam) about the day she admitted Cheney to the clinic and the suicide attempt that preceded it. Cheney speaks with her father (blueberry muffin, fruit) and brother (eggs, toast, fruit) while weaving in her own experience with Vivienne at the clinic.
Together they create a portrait of a family blinded by its own lore, a young girl defiantly seeking attention through starvation, and a community of women that helped her come back from the edge. Listeners sit with the uncomfortable realities of a journalist investigating what really happened during an experience everyone but her wants to forget. The portrait Cheney delivers is tough to hear. She expertly places tape of her mother describing their complex breakfast tablescape with the details of various patients’ rules for eating at the clinic. Vivienne offers a terrifyingly memorable character - someone walking a fine line between life and death and from whom you cannot turn away. Throughout the piece we hear Cheney playing piano, a specific song from her anorectic period, transforming each musical interstitial into its own piece of narration. Concerning Breakfast is a forceful memoir that scrapes at the veneer of audio reportage.
Cheney’s co-producer, Jay Allison, is a pioneer of the medium who has trained many iconic audio journalists. His studio, Atlantic Public Media, alongside the team at Transom, represent a school of sound that emanates from Cape Cod and has become a standard for narrative audio across the medium. Here, Cheney and Allison achieve a game of sonic chess, strategically unpacking family grief and delivering this story in a way that leaves listeners unsure of which way is forward. But that’s the true nature of a personal story, and the reason Concerning Breakfast remains at the forefront of the creative conversation some 25 years from its initial airing.