According to the New York Times (linked to by a post on Grub Street), Gourmet Magazine will be shuttered. If you can’t hear the hearts breaking of everybody who’s ever loved food and/or magazines, you must have your iPod up pretty loud.

Bear with me while I get sappy: Gourmet has had a bigger impact on my life than any other magazine has or will. It was always in my house growing up, but I didn’t start reading it until I was 22. I was working in a newsroom in New York at the time, living in a dark studio apartment in the basement of a building in the not-yet-hipster Fort Greene, and Gourmet was the only luxury I could afford. Once an issue was released I would carry it in my bag until the next issue was out; by that time, it was tattered and torn and crinkled. (It wasn’t stained with food, though—I hardly had a kitchen to cook in.)

Eventually I realized that I was spending more time thinking about a food magazine than I was thinking about the news. (Of course, this was in 2001—I needed a distraction.) I found myself daydreaming about the careers of the writers in Gourmet—first Jane and Michael Stern, the incomparable duo behind the Roadfood column, then Ruth Reichl, the magazine’s editor-in-chief. Like everybody else who reads the Sterns, I wanted to drive across the country and stop into random Pennsylvania truck stops to find the best cheesesteaks in the world. (I didn’t have a car, so I ventured out into New York instead, and started sending reviews to Time Out New York.) To satiate my appetite for Ruth, I started reading her books—Comfort Me With Apples was out in hardback at the time, and my then-boyfriend gave me a copy. Which probably wasn’t the smartest move, because reading about Ruth’s love affairs convinced me to dump that boyfriend with the quickness.

As I transitioned into a full-time food writer, I figured Gourmet’s allure would start to fade—especially as I began to work for them myself. But in fact the magazine only became more mysterious. Gourmet didn’t seem to pay attention to the silly rules of  other magazines. Timeliness didn’t matter so much as a good story, and the recipes were inconsistent—they varied wildly from simple and straightfoward to almost laughably complex. Sometimes the whims of the editors bored me—but the fact that the magazine indulged those whims was what kept me picking up the next issue.

To put it in a succint cliché: I can’t imagine a world without Gourmet. And though my life as a food writer, and a contributor to the magazine, may be more affected by the closure than some others, that’s not really the pain I’m feeling. I’m feeling the pain of a reader; I’m trying not to imagine the approaching moment when a month goes by and Gourmet doesn’t reach my mailbox.