finished first: Comfort Me With Apples, Ruth Reichl

[toastykitten]

I liked her first book, "Tender at the Bone", and I was actually searching for her latest, "Garlic & Sapphires", which details her life as a New York Times food critic. This book takes place in-between, in which her first marriage falls apart, her father passes away, and she gets to go to China. It's really hard to describe how much it hurt when I read that she was not just going to China, but she was going to Taishan, or as the Chinese dude corrects her, "Toi San". (However, if you were actually saying it in the dialect, it would be "Hoi San".) I was like, fuck, she's going to where my parents are from. It would have been right after the Revolution, and she probably went nowhere near my actual village.

So that part was kind of hard to read. The other part that was difficult to read was when she and her husband decided to adopt, and they had to give back the baby to the mother. She fights really hard to keep the baby, even though deep down she probably knows the right thing to do was to let her go.

Throughout the entire novel, food is a constant - defining seduction, comfort, security. She includes several recipes for foods she made while either working out her emotions, or atoning for her perceived sins, or for wallowing.