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Title details for The Comfort Food Diaries by Emily Nunn - Available

The Comfort Food Diaries

My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart

by Emily Nunn
Candace Thaxton
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
A former New Yorker editor chronicles her journey to heal old wounds and find comfort in the face of loss through travel, friends and family, and home-cooked meals in this memoir "full of warm, bracing honesty...humor and paradox...and sprinkled liberally with the type of recipes that will make book club members say, 'I could make that!'" (Booklist, starred review).
One life-changing night, reeling from her beloved brother's sudden death, a devastating breakup with her handsome engineer fiancé, and eviction from the apartment they shared, Emily Nunn had lost all sense of family, home, and financial security.

After a few glasses of wine, heartbroken and unmoored, Emily—an avid cook and professional food writer—poured her heart out on Facebook. The next morning she woke up with an awful hangover and a feeling she'd made a terrible mistake—only to discover she had more friends than she knew, many of whom invited her to come visit and cook with them while she put her life back together. Thus began the Comfort Food Tour.

Searching for a way forward, Emily travels the country, cooking and staying with relatives and friends. Her wonderfully idiosyncratic family comes to life in these pages, all part of the rich Southern story in which past and present are indistinguishable, food is a source of connection and identity, and a good story is often preferred to a not-so-pleasant truth. But truth, pleasant or not, is what Emily Nunn craves, and with it comes an acceptance of the losses she has endured, and a sense of hope for the future.

In the salty snap of a single Virginia ham biscuit, in the sour tang of Great-Grandmother's Mean Lemon Cake, Nunn experiences the healing power of comfort food—and offers up dozens of recipes for the wonderful meals that saved her life. "The Comfort Food Diaries is nothing less than a tour de force by Emily Nunn, our most hilarious and touching food writer. You'll laugh, you'll cry...and you'll get hungry" (Mark Bittman, author of How to Cook Everything).

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 26, 2017

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781508241676
      • File size: 319978 KB
      • Duration: 11:06:37

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from June 12, 2017
      Gorgeous and moving, Nunn’s memoir will enlighten readers on how closely food can be intertwined with healing. Nunn, a former New Yorker arts editor, reflects early on that “the very idea of comfort food is often a scattershot longing, an elastic and suggestible concept,” and recounts how comfort food helped her heal after the death of her brother Gil. In straightforward prose, Nunn describes her alcoholism in the wake of Gil’s suicide and her subsequent stint in the Betty Ford Center. Along the way, readers meet those in Nunn’s life who share their recipes and stories with her while she rebuilds her idea of family. She includes recipes for the key comfort food meals of her life, such as a recipe for cream cheese and olive sandwiches, which she ate as a fourth grader with a “nervous stomach”; a recipe for the Bolognese ragù she made while staying with her aunt Mariah, trying “to get it together”; and a recipe for the collard soup prepared by her friend Portia as they discussed AA meetings. With powerful prose and rich details, her memoir is simultaneously uplifting and heartbreaking.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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