The author and journalist opens up about her new memoir, finding love again, and why she is still good friends with her ex despite his years of affairs.
Kate Legge is already regretting her choice of venue for our lunch interview when I arrive at Boire in North Melbourne. She’s perched on a tiny stool on the pavement outside the wine bar and starts apologising when I arrive.
, it’s just more a place for a glass of wine than a meal, with a limited menu of bar snacks and two sandwiches for lunch.
“Everyone’s going to say when they see that: ‘I knew she didn’t eat’,” Legge, 69, laughs as she hands me the concise menu. The memoir uses food as a springboard to chart the course of Legge’s life including her family, friendships, lovers and career.
It covers Legge’s childhood growing up in Melbourne bottling peaches and pears with her grandmother, attending Melbourne University, landing a job in journalism and working in Canberra and Washington as a correspondent, where her souvenirs from Capitol Hill include a cherished recipe for a three-tiered carrot cake. Even though Boire is a wine bar, Legge thinks it’s safer to stick to soft drink over our lunch.
“I’m an over-sharer,” she says, ordering a fruity non-alcoholic peach soda made in-house. She speaks as she writes: engaging and considered.
“Even though it was published 13 years afterwards, it was still a harrowing subject to revisit and talk about, after I’d actually healed from all of that,” Legge says. Legge was blindsided by the revelation of Hywood’s affairs, which had occurred over many years, including with one of her close friends. Discovering infidelity across four generations of her family, Legge set out to explore whether cheating runs in families.
“It’s a difficult subject for people, even if it’s not about them, it’s nonetheless opening those veins,” she says. “We’re always thinking about our next meal,” she says. “It was lovely to write about food after going through all that; it was a really nice subject to immerse yourself in and draw on.
”and she enjoys exploring the area, which she describes as “interesting and diverse” in comparison to her stomping grounds ofLegge says she and Hywood are still good friends and are still married because of a horror of paperwork, despite eventually splitting up after the revelation of his affairs.
“We have similar interests and backgrounds, passion for journalism, politics and history,” she says. “All those things have given us a framework for moving ahead and we’ve got kids together, and so there’s so much there that holds you together. ”includes Hywood’s recipe for “pasta dimanche”, christened in honour of a Sunday night when he raided the pantry to feed the family.
Legge says after the fallout, the pair have tried to be positive role models for how to manage separation for the rest of their family.
“Rather than the poisoning and the toxic environments that can be created when people are warring, domestically fighting,” she says. “I’ve covered enough Family Court dramas to know that that sort of damage begets damage. ” A trio of taro fritters is a great bar snack but comically tiny for lunch at Boire in North Melbourne.
, once ending up in a tug of war with Legge over how to dress a lamb shoulder in a crust of crumbs, prosciutto, garlic and oil, Capriolo grew up in a household where square meals were a rarity.
“Nicky has a very difficult relationship with food,” Legge says, describing how he cased her pantry cupboards when they first met – a habit ingrained from a childhood of going hungry. “The other day he said to me, ‘I’ve just come home from the supermarket, I’ve got so much food, I feel somehow as if it’s wrong’. He feels completely spoiled by having so much food because of this tricky relationship with always wanting it, never having it.
”For now, Capriolo and Legge are enjoying “living together apart”, which she says gives everyone space. In her book, she includes Capriolo’s recipe for a feta and garlic dip made with a whole block of feta, “a ton” of garlic, generous swirls of extra-virgin olive oil and cracked black pepper. Traditionally, journalists are counselled to not make themselves the story, but Legge says she has never flinched from turning her gimlet eye on herself.
“I think because of the fact that I have always written about myself, and after I finished covering politics in Canberra and Washington, I fashioned that into something that I did all the time,” she says. “I’ve never been shy of putting myself out there. But what I tried to do in both books, is to be honest about your own motives, honest about your own behaviour. Otherwise, it’s just boring.
” Our food arrives: a trio of taro fritters for Legge, which are so comically tiny, daintily placed on a smear of hot sauce, that we laugh out loud. My lunch is more substantial, a charcoal chicken roll made using dense, springy bread with pickled red onion and dripping with green chilli mayonnaise.
It’s probably not the sort of food you want to be photographed eating, so I can see why Legge has chosen the bar snack option, but I’m worried she is going to go hungry. Legge grew up in a household where books were her escape and writing beckoned as a career.
, where she recalls “channelling Lois Lane in a pale-grey suit with a pencil skirt” and how on her first day in the newsroom, she spotted a girl with straight blonde hair in a vintage pink dress, who turned out to be cartoonistnewsroom evoked grit and glamour: international clocks ticking through foreign date lines, telex machines punching updates from global hotspots, telephones, chattering typewriters and the throb of urgency,” she writes. An early lesson came from then-weekend editor Eric Beecher, now owner of Private Media and publisher of Crikey, when Legge reported on the Archibald Prize being withheld when the trustees couldn’t agree on a portrait worthy of the honour.
Legge set the scene, describing the room where the judges met to deliberate over cups of tea and plates of sandwiches, but Beecher called her into his cubicle with one question: “What kind of sandwiches did they eat? ” The answer was chicken and mayonnaise with parsley, pepper and salt, on white bread, cut into points.
“How could I have left this out? ” Legge asks.
“Details that seem insignificant bring colour and clarity; they can convey nuance and meaning. ”Beecher made his point, and Legge’s writing sparkles with details like the “red ball marks on the ceilings” from her footy-playing sons and a freezer that is an “Aladdin’s cave with ice cubes of broth and cheese biscuit dough”. , Legge says she’s benefited from “hours of therapy, a shoulder, a solution, a suggestion, a dress she’s seen that would look perfect on me”.
“She has been absolutely cancelled ,” Legge says. “I got a conjunctival hemorrhage in my left eye because we were having this massive argument over Trump. But food is an ideological free zone, and so we can still have a friendship. ” Legge now leaves certain topics “strictly off-limits” with Arndt but the pair enjoy swapping books, streaming titles, photos of grandchildren, news of new partners and the joys of living apart together.
, who was vilified in 1995 when he illustrated the thoughts of a baby distraught at being left at childcare and then later, a baby “That came from a good place in him, but he suffered a lot from making that point,” Legge says.
“He didn’t like the idea of corporate commercial childcare and I think that’s been shown to be true unless it’s properly regulated, which it hasn’t been. These are the terrible truths we’ve been learning. ” I say that his cartoons did seem to be particularly targeted at mothers, making a generation of women feel guilty. Paul Jeffersrecommending 24 hours a week as the maximum time apart for mothers and toddlers before separation anxiety could hamper a child’s development.
Legge stood in the street with her neighbour with whom she shared a nanny speed reading the magazine and “swatting away our unease”. Now Legge’s children are grown-ups with children of their own and many of her friends have retired and “clutching the kite strings of superannuation with the skip of school-leavers shedding uniforms and study plans. ” Legge still spends her time writing, she’s just returned from researching her next project, a biography, in the archives at the library.
There’s no hallowed space where this writing happens, instead true to form, Legge writes at the kitchen table with proximity to tea and coffee making facilities and the pantry in easy reach. After our lunch Legge sends an email entitled “Ravenous” apologising for nominating a lunch spot with such skimpy rations.
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