Allie Rowbottom on her memoir, "Jell-O Girls," and the tragedies that loom behind one of America's most nostalgic desserts

For many Americans, Jell-O is as interlaced into our lives as Thanksgiving turkey, hot dogs on the Fourth of July, and sugar cookies topped with gritty, pastel-colored icing laid out for Santa Claus. My memories of Jell-O begin with primary colored Jell-O jigglers in the shape of moons and stars – my chubby child hands leaving latent fingerprints in their surface as I poked at them on the aluminum pan where my mother laid them. When I find myself eating in cafeterias, even today, Jell-O feels like a necessary selection, much like ginger ale on an airplane or popcorn smothered in coconut oil at the movie theater. In my pre-teen and teenage years, Jell-O became a “safe” food for me to consume without worry of an overabundance of calories. When I developed ulcers from progressed bulimia, it was one of the few foods I could swallow that didn’t feel like razor edges on my insides. I’d let the gelatinous artificiality turn to mush in my mouth, squishing through the spaces in between my teeth, savoring every last bite of the sweetness I rarely afforded myself in those days. 

Norman Rockwell, wholly American painter and illustrator born in New York City, was commissioned by Jell-O to illustrate various advertisements and cookbooks. Amongst his archive of work depicting nuclear families and military men are rosy-cheeked Aryan children preparing Jell-O – so easy, the advertisements explain, even a child can make it. As Campbell’s Soup belongs to Andy Warhol, Jell-O, likewise, is irrevocably linked to Rockwell’s kitschy American sentimentality. 

As much as Jell-O’s bright colored sweetness feels like virtuous Americana, it has, as many things do, a seamy background. Most who consume it don’t think much about the process through which it is made – by boiling the connective tissues, ligaments, bones, and skin of animals, and processed to extract collagen hydrolysate. The wholesome dessert’s genesis is found in the discarded, grotesque, and otherwise useless parts of a a slaughtered animal – congealed and flavored black cherry, lime, strawberry.

Like so, the history of the Jell-O company and the “Jell-O family” is not as easy to swallow as its namesake product. In “Jell-O Girls,” Allie Rowbottom dives into the origins of Jell-O, when her great-great-great uncle bought the patent from the inventor, solidifying wealth and privilege for generations of Rowbottom’s family to come, and dooming them to a lifetime of what she refers to as “the Jell-O curse.” The curse, metaphorically written, torments mainly the women of the Jell-O family as they suffer at the hands various of men, illnesses, obsessions, and addictions. As Rowbottom tells me, if the history of Jell-O was written by other family members, particularly men, “They would have written a very different book.” 

The memoir braids itself with the stories of Rowbottom’s grandmother, her mother, and herself, along with the “Le Roy girls,” a group of young women from the hometown of Jell-O itself, Le Roy, afflicted with a mysterious bout of uncontrollable twitching – which becomes less mysterious as various significant traumas are revealed. “Jell-O Girls” itself is permeated with trauma, from sexual abuse, to infidelity, to the agony of premature death when both Rowbottom’s grandmother and mother are diagnosed with the same detrimental, incurable cancer. 

I had the chance to speak with Allie Rowbottom about the book, trauma, womanhood, and the bond between mother and daughter that even death itself cannot break. 

When you were a kid, did you know you were a part of the Jell-O family? Was it integral to your life, or did it really not matter at all?

Both. It didn’t matter, and I think my mom did a lot of work to separate herself. We could have lived in Le Roy, which is still very wedded to its identity as the birthplace of Jell-O. At one point, I remember my dad, to my mom, was like, “Well, do you want to move back there? Would that make you feel like you were more a part of the family?” I think she wanted to separate herself. At the same time, Jell-O as a tether was there for her from the get-go, so it was a part of life in as much she talked about it, but there wasn’t really anything else. There was some money, which was just mysterious to me for most of my life. It was my mother’s inheritance, and she came into it in spurts. It was always a mysterious thing where somebody had died, and money was now unlocked. 

There are various themes throughout the book: womanhood, trauma, the bond between mother and daughter. Was there a particular theme you hoped would stick with readers the most, or that felt the most important to you?

I think the mother and daughter stuff. My relationship with my mom, I still think about it all the time. I’m still dealing with not having her and what that means for my life as a woman in the world. She was a woman in the world without a mother, now I’m a woman in the world without a mother. If I have a child, what would that mean for that child’s life? All of those questions, that’s what I want to stick for readers. 

Even though you’ve already written about your mother in this book, it’s not like the topic’s done. Do you feel like you’d ever write about her specifically again in a different way? 

Yes. Already happening. Right now I’m writing fiction, but she’s completely in it. I have another manuscript that I’ve worked on and then put in a drawer, but she was in that as well. How could I ever not write about her? In so many ways, she’s this compass that I keep trying to find now, and the only way I know how to make sense of things is through my writing – and the most productive, healthy way, I guess. That’s how I get back to her, so I’ll never stop writing about her, I don’t think. 

You talked about using your mother’s own oral retelling of events along with her memoir as sources. What else did you use to research your familial history?

Honestly, not that much. I did have, and this was really important when it came time to write my grandmother’s stuff, this giant, thick binder of her letters. They were written primarily from her to her mother. Sometimes when I think about the book, I’m like, “Oh, that would be an interesting thing that didn’t make it in,” which was her relationship with her mom. I didn’t know enough about it, and by the time I was filling that part of the book out, my mom had already passed away, so it was like, “I don’t know who to ask about this.” I had that, and I had my mom’s memoir and her experiences. 

There’s also a lot of research into varying subjects related to Jell-O, culture, patriarchy, the girls from Le Roy. What are some of the most interesting places your research took you even if you didn’t include them in the book?

Weight Watchers. I could have just waded into it. Some of it made it in, but I could have gone deeper. I think I could have gone deeper into any pocket, like the domestic science movement was really, really interesting to me, and the book “Perfection Salad” by Laura Shapiro really does a deep dive on it. The Perfection Salad was the first Jell-O salad, and it was actually made with Knox Gelatin and entered into a contest sponsored by Knox Gelatin, and that then birthed this whole movement of salad making with gelatin, and Jell-O took over. 

“Perfection Salad” is where you can read all about that, and all about domestic science and its awkward relationship to feminism. That and more of the gray area between cultural moments and feminism, that’s what interests me. In general, even in what I’m working on now, I’m so interested in how Instagram, and filters, and how we present ourselves to the world is both incredibly problematic for women and also potentially empowering. We’re presenting ourselves, we’re in charge of the presentation of our own bodies in a way that we’ve never been before in some cases. I could go on about this, but any area where Jell-O and feminism were either at odds or awkwardly supporting each other, that is something I could have deep dived into. 

Can you elaborate more on your interest in Weight Watchers?

The cult of it, the different iterations that the company has gone through in terms of how it markets itself to women and how it creates systems through which we can control and manage our food in the name of freedom. It’s like, “I’m in control because I can keep a tally on things, and I know if I want a slice of carrot cake, I can just save my points.” That mentality for me in my life, I will never get rid of that. I have Weight Watchers to thank for that. 

When writing this, how much was purposefully held back to save for future writing projects? Are there branches of stories that you omitted as to not reveal everything at once?

No. I do feel like this book says everything I want it to about this particular story. When I was done with it, I was like, “I do not want to keep telling this story.” I want to talk about motherhood, and daughterhood, and women, and women’s relationships, and women’s bodies, but I don’t want to talk about Jell-O. 

Your mother’s death is an integral part of the book, but she died during the course of you writing it. How did her death change the trajectory of the book itself and how did your process of writing it change?

It changed so much. I had written a lot of material that I ended up cutting, a lot of stuff about her early life and her time at the Austen Riggs Center that took up much more space in the book than it does now. Then it moved, as it does now, into her illness. There are scenes in the book where what I don’t say is I was sitting at the table with her while she was actively dying, with my binder of the book itself in front of me and my computer, taking care of her while trying to write the book. It’s insane because the two events were entwined, but even though she was in hospice, I didn’t know she was going to die. 

I think her death totally changed both the beginning and end of the book. When she died, she finished the story for me, otherwise it ended on these ambiguous note words like, “She might die, she might not, we don’t know.” After that, I was like, “Okay, this sucks.” At the same time, the book completely clicked into place for me, and I felt this urgency to finish it. I was like, “I actually want to do something with this, I need to make something out of all of this. It’s been so much in and out of the hospital, I need to make something of this.” 

Kind of related to that, how did the finished book differ from your original ideas of what it would come to be?

On a practical level, A, I wasn’t sure I could write a book. When I had the idea, I was like, “Well, obviously I’m in this [PhD] program where people write books, but maybe I’ll just do a collection of essays.” My mentor, Matt Johnson, was like, “No, you should write that book. I want to read that book.” So I was like, “Okay, I’ll write a book.” Just the idea of finishing was this weird abstraction to me. 

I think I wrote 80 pages in the first summer that I worked on it, and the rest of the time I was teaching and had no time to write anyway, and I just hovered at 80 pages for the longest time. My idea of it was just this thing that I might finish, and maybe, in the best case scenario, get a small press to publish. I had envisioned it as a sort of swirling, dreamy, maybe short book, and it ended up being this way more narratively driven or chronologically ordered manuscript than I ever thought that I could write. I got an agent, and then it sold to a big publisher. I was like, “Holy shit! That is not how I saw this going at all. Okay, let’s do it.”

The Jell-O curse is referred to often in the book. Do you believe in the curse especially as it relates to yourself?

That’s actually interesting because I feel like I got asked that question a lot at first when the book first came out. I would be like, “The curse is a metaphor, it’s patriarchy. No, I don’t think there’s a curse.” Now actually, I’m like, “I don’t know, maybe I am cursed.” [In the way that I’m] personally, and as a writer, attuned to the unbearable weight of womanhood and patriarchy’s toll, maybe in some weird, abstract way I am cursed. But no, I don’t think there’s an actual curse upon me, necessarily. I do feel like, as I said, personally as a writer I’m super sensitive to cultural messaging and that doesn’t mean I’m immune to it, so it’s painful. 

What are your thoughts on inherited trauma and is it synonymous with or related to the Jell-O curse?

Yes, I think it’s related to the Jell-O curse. In my mind the curse is the inherited trauma of existing as a woman in a patriarchy. I keep using that word, I wish there was a better one. The patriarchy, what does it mean anymore? I guess the inherited trauma of being a woman in a culture and in a world that has a vested interest in our oppression in ways that are covert and ingrained, which, to me, is a part of the Jell-O curse. The other part of the Jell-O curse is inherited trauma not specific to womanhood that manifests as various addictions that no amount of money can really fix. 

In an era where women are suddenly feeling more free to speak about abuse they’ve endured, do you think we should be asking ourselves how well we know our own mothers and what they’ve been through or accepted as normal?

Seriously, yes. I’m sure many women are asking themselves that. I think also of our own experiences; sometimes I just feel like it’s so foggy to have had really formative and traumatizing experiences – sexually and otherwise – as a woman. This is true for anything, to live on with that because of everything that goes into constructing us as girls and women in this culture is to just devalue it from the get-go. It’s such a hurdle to overcome, and to own, and to understand. I don’t even know if healing from it is a possibility, not to be grim. 

We touched on this, but your eating disorder becomes a big theme in the book along with an obsession and drive for perfection. Is it possible to ever fully recover from an eating disorder? Do those ways of thinking ever go away entirely?

I wish so much, but no, not for me. Everybody is different, but for me, the best I can hope for is to be able to consistently put a little bit of space between me and this internal system/thought process that is my eating disorder, but it will take a different shape if I let it. In my marriage, we call this thing the “controller.” The controller comes out at weird times, when I feel that it’s needed or that something inside me feels like it’s needed. The best that I can hope for is just to see the controller as something that is not me, exactly. It’s a part of me, but it’s not me. I think about this a lot now because prior to my mom’s death, it was not so hard for me. Now, just living in the world is much harder. I feel like after she died I relied on some of my old coping mechanisms, as one would and does, but now it’s going to be four years [since her death], which is crazy for me. I’m starting to crawl back out again and figure out how to manage all of that anxiety in a world without a buoy. 

The end of the book speculates how you will carry on the rest of your life and become a mother yourself without your mother there. You state that you “feel that sense of oneness like a phantom limb.” In what ways does your mother still appear in your life since her passing, and how do you keep her one with you?

I need some better ways. I have artifacts, I have her name tattooed on my hand. I don’t, and this is something that I struggle with a lot, live in a place where there’s memory of her. I don’t ever visit her house anymore. It’s not her house anymore. I know for a fact that if she came and saw me writing and making art, she would be like, “I like this. This is good.” I feel like that’s how I do it, I write. 

Purchase “Jell-O Girls” by Allie Rowbottom through this link.