October 18, 2010 In an essay for The Wall Street Journal, Ann Patchett remembers the decade she spent freelancing for Gourmet magazine, when “Magazine work was a beautiful party and we all just figured it would go on forever.” For Patchett, the party featured assignments to exotic destinations, a generous expense account (which once reimbursed her for a soup turtle she had set free), and– perhaps most luxurious of all– an editor who valued her work: “For 10 golden years they picked up the tab while I ate at the best restaurants and laid down my head on the highest thread-count sheets,” she writes. “I never saw a bill. They booked things directly. They took care of me. I was a travel writer, or, as my beloved editor Bill Sertl once told me, pointing to the tagline on the cover which read, Gourmet, a Magazine of Fine Living, ‘You are the fine-living part.'” Read “Did I Kill Gourmet magazine?” here.
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