Dame Kathleen Flinn
Profile by Judith H. Dern
Measure, pour, stir, sift, write and share. Words describing Dame Kathleen Flinn’s singular culinary career. Add a synchronistic blending of clarity and inspiration, plus impressive journalism skills and a generous spirit, and Kat is a self-created, bi-coastal woman with four top-selling non-fiction books. She even has a social media fan club in Japan where two translated books are a best-sellers.
Launching her career, Kathleen’s first jobs were with the Chicago Sun-Times and Adweek before she was age 20, the result of veering into journalism instead of pursuing a law degree. “Writing was easy for me,” she says, “and then I discovered you could be paid to write.” Add an internship at Playboy when she was 22 and her early writing path sizzled!
What motivated Kathleen’s eventual swerve into the culinary world? A consequence of her reporter’s job with The Sarasota Herald-Tribune in Florida, where she’d moved during the 1990s recession for a regular assignment writing obituaries. “It was where I learned to talk to people, to conduct interviews, the only time anyone will ever laminate my articles and tuck them into their Bible,” she recalls. “There, I came across the shortest-ever obituary with only a name and date and nothing else for an 84-year-old woman. It showed up simultaneously with an ad in Gourmet magazine for Le Cordon Bleu in Paris,” she remembers. “I cut out the Cordon Bleu ad and put it over my desk with the no-words obituary–a reminder.”
Ever adventurous, in 1996, she joined Microsoft and moved to London with the company three years later. “In 2004, returning from Florida, I learned my job had been eliminated,” she remembers. But did the sky fall? Not a chance. Kat–with husband-to-be Mike’s encouragement–enrolled in the Paris Cordon Bleu program. The rest, you can say, is literary serendipity. Drawing on her experiences at Cordon Bleu, in 2007, Kathleen published The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry, still a best-seller translated into 10 languages.
Setting up shop in Seattle (family in Florida still beckon regularly), writing with culinary twists continued as Kat’s focus. In 2014, family remembrances inspired her to write Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good – A Memoir of Food and Love from an American Midwest Family.
But her 2011 book, The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cook, is the title propelling her into Japanese stardom. Inspired after watching a woman load her shopping cart with processed foods, Kathleen convinced the woman to reload her cart with items ready to prepare into easy meals, and then turned the experience into a book. Another U.S. bestseller, the book launched her claim to fame in Japan for both print and eBook versions.
“There’s no word for ‘counter’ in Japanese,” Kat says, “so when the book was translated in 2017, it was renamed “Miracle Cooking Lessons for Bad Women.” I had no idea until I was deluged with Facebook and Twitter requests from Japan. Japanese culture is very binary with a high expectation for female perfection, which made the book super appealing.” In 2019, she traveled to Japan where she was interviewed and appeared on TV. This first book was followed with a second, Sakana Lesson, in Japanese with Japanese-centric content.
You guessed it! This culinary storyteller has two more books “under construction” on her desktop, plus writes regular posts for her website and podcast, KathleenFlinn.com.
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