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 âfull of warm, bracing honestyâŠhumor and paradoxâŠand sprinkled liberally with the type of recipes that will make book club members say, âI could make that!ââ (Booklist, starred review).
One life-changing night, reeling from her beloved brotherâs sudden death, a devastating breakup with her handsome engineer fiancĂ©, 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, Emilyâan avid cook and professional food writerâpoured her heart out on Facebook. The next morning she woke up with an awful hangover and a feeling sheâd made a terrible mistakeâonly 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-Grandmotherâs Mean Lemon Cake, Nunn experiences the healing power of comfort foodâand offers up dozens of recipes for the wonderful meals that saved her life. âThe Comfort Food Diaries is nothing less than a tour de force by Emily Nunn, our most hilarious and touching food writer. Youâll laugh, youâll cry...and youâll get hungryâ (Mark Bittman, author of How to Cook Everything).
