This is one of my favorite episodes of the new We Saw You video series. Restaurateur/artist Karen Carrier tells me how she got into cooking. In the 1980s, she was living in New York, where she was going to go to graduate school. But she had to “figure out a way to make a living.”

You need to hear Carrier talk about all this. Her life sounds like a novel I’d like to read. And re-read.

Michael Donahue began his career in 1975 at the now-defunct Memphis Press-Scimitar and moved to The Commercial Appeal in 1984, where he wrote about food and dining, music, and covered social events until...