The Joys of Cooking: A Love Story is a feminist coming of age story, a romantic tale about the marriage between a straight woman and a gay man, and a sensuous account of cooking as a means of finding place and comfort in the world. To quote the prologue, “My cookbooks were more than a record of my past. They were agents of my recovery—from childhood misery, from profound self-loss, and from my fear, even as an adult, that the world would never seem like home. I had cooked to save my life, and I’d succeeded.”
Organized by decade and by cookbook, and spanning seventy years, The Joys of Cooking is similar in spirit to M.F.K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1943; Wiley Publishing Inc, 2004). However, it differs from Gastronomical Me, and from most food memoirs, in the unexpected nature of its love story, in the emphasis it gives to the historical context and political meaning of its heroine’s culinary journey, and in the way it moves beyond the merely personal to explore the ways in which cooking can lay the groundwork for political community. It will engage readers who are fond of food and food memoir, books on self-help, and love stories, as well as those with an interest in the changing cultural experiences of the baby boomer generation.
