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Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton

17 Apr

When I turned over the last page of Gabrielle Hunter’s debut memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, I was genuinely devastated. I had thought I had a few pages left. I wasn’t ready for it to end. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye.

This is not to say that the book does not end well or just as it should, rather I had grown accustomed to Hunter’s company and I knew that when the book was finished I was going to miss her. Yeah, she’s not perfect. In fact, she can even be sort of an asshole sometimes, but from page one of this gorgeously written book, filled with honesty and life, I knew that I would love her forever. And I do.

To me there should be another subtitle: motherhood lost and found for within motherhood and food and feeding are intertwined just as they are (or can be) in life. Even when my own mother was emotionally lost to me, she always fed me. In fact, the smells of my own kitchen now are what remind me the most about her. Just as Hamilton describes her relationship with food: all returning back to that first kitchen.

The book begins when Hamilton’s mother and father divorcing, and with Hamilton’s mother moving to Vermont leaving Hamilton rootless and motherless. From there Hamilton rebels, she screws up, until eventually learning to nurture and mother herself and put herself on a path to find her way. In the years before she opens Prune, she works as a caterer and enters an MFA program in Michigan, where she takes a second job working with a woman who will become her cooking mentor. In short, she finds a stand-in mother for a time. And like Hamilton’s own mother, the relationship circles around the cooking, the food.

Finally, it is through her sad marriage that Hamilton meets the uber mother stand in: the Italian matriarch. Though she and her Italian mother-in-law don’t speak the same language, they learn to communicate with each other through cooking. And in the end as Hamilton’s marriage more fully dissolves and as her mother-in-law’s life winds down, Hamilton and her mother-in-law very nearly become one–just as one does with a child in the womb–as finally Hamilton is passed the torch to be the next Mamma.

As for the food: Hamilton should not be mistaken for a foodie. In fact, she would like (paraphrasing) people to just eat and shut up about it. She’s equally ambivalent about celebrity chefdom, even though she sends herself farther down that path with the release of this book.

It’s a terrific book. Filled with humor and exotic locations and hard work and sad times. There’s also a lot of love.

Read it.

Bad Marie, by Marcy Dermansky

18 Feb

Bad Marie is a bad influence. I say this because while reading Marcy Dermansky’s second novel, Bad Marie, I was driven to do something that I, as a mother of a small, active child, never do anymore–and that is stay up past 11PM reading, which should tell you something about how engrossing this novel is if even an exhausted mother will stay up late reading it.

It is that good.

So what about Marie? Who is she? She’s a nanny. She’s an ex-con. She’s a fuck up. She’s also got a big, twisted heart that wants love and healing and happiness and yet all of the people she’s ever loved have let her down; basically, Marie makes bad choices about who to love. Except for one. And that one is the little kid she babysits for, Caitlin. And in this relationship between caregiver and child is the crux of the story.

Of course, being a two-year-old there is one crucial moment when Caitlin does disappoint Marie because she cannot possibly respond in an adult. In that moment, Marie first decides to respond in her typical way, but finds she can’t do it. She has grown. She has learned to put this child’s needs above her own. And that, my friends, is pretty close the love a parent feels.

Okay, so Marie is still not technically doing the right thing in that she kidnapped Caitlin from first her mother and then her father, but her heart is eventually in the right place. Ultimately, she does feel guilt and does want what’s best for Caitlin; she just lacks the skills to figure out how do the right thing.

Here is a book that is both literary and plot driven, humorous and heartbreaking. Here is a book that makes you feel for the protagonist despite the horrible things she does. After all, she is still that hard luck kid whose friend’s mother took pity. Okay, she is a grown up and she’s doing a horrible thing by keeping this child from her parents, but, in the end, her intentions are sort of good. In the end, I believe she will bring Caitlin home.

This is not to say I want to befriend Marie or have her watch my kid (and sleep with my husband), but I do understand her a bit more. I do feel for her. With that said, I was extremely anxious as I read the final 20 or so pages of this book and felt that I constantly needed to make sure that my kid was okay. As such, I finished the book sitting on the couch next to him as he watched Cyberchase with his bare feet tucked up under my leg to keep them warm. I did not want to let him out of my sight.

All this is to say, it’s a book that stirs up a lot of complex emotion and it’s a brave book. There are readers, I’m sure, who will judge the book solely on the actions of the character. If they did so, they would be missing out. Bad Marieis a book you will not want to miss.

A Life’s Work, by Rachel Cusk

10 Jul

When my dear friend Kat came to visit on the day after my son’s first birthday, she brought with her several books, one of which was Rachel Cusk’s brilliant, startling book A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother.

Kat expressed regret that she had not gotten the book to me sooner, but now having read the book, I have to say I think her timing was perfect. I’m not sure my elated, exhausted heart could have stood the revelations this book provided any sooner than now. In short, it is a deeply moving book which may reveal to you the core of your secret heart during that first year of motherhood.

My husband and I don’t typically fight but this year has brought several merciless arguments, many of them ending (or beginning) with my husband saying, “I know how you feel” (and he has every right to believe this as he has been an excellent provider of care for our son and has suffered exhaustion and has experienced the deep love) and with me saying, “No, you don’t.”

I keep trying to explain how I feel to my husband but cannot find the words and it seems I don’t have to now because Rachel Cusk has found them for me. The fear, the loneliness, the exhaustion. The desire to escape, to find the lost self. And above and beyond all, the exquisite, blinding, all-encompassing love for this being who once shared your body and forever more seeks independence, as you seek reconnection.

Simply put, Cusk is fearless in her examination of motherhood.

Here, at the end of the book when Cusk witnesses a new mother with her own mother in a shop, she encapsulates so beautifully, how I feel, or rather, how I have felt:

“She can’t bear something to go unresolved, unfinished, for she fears that nothing will ever be resolved again. She’s trying to keep up, to stay in time, but she’s swimming against a powerful current. I see her steal looks at her mother, brimming with longing and confusion and hurt. After all these years she has discovered her mother’s secret and it is somehow disappointing, a let-down, for she is in those first days of her parturition both mother and child, and the passionate emotion she feels for her vulnerable self finds no reflection in her own mother’s disapproval, her compassionless urge to dispute. Years of human politics have adhered to her mother’s heart: they hang from it like stalectites, like moss. Her own heart is new, raw, frantically pulsing. Will time turn it, too, unfeeling?

The baby cries and cries; and it is all I can do not to lift it from its stroller and hold its small, frightened body close against my chest, hold it and hold it until it stops, so certain am I that it would, that it would know that I knew, and be consoled.”

Cusk is funny, smart. Her views may shock you if you are not used to honesty. At its core, you will probably see what I saw as I read, that this is a woman who deeply loves her children and who understands how we become a mother to the world when we become a mother.

With that, I say thank you very much for writing this book, Rachel Cusk, and thank you very much for giving it to me, Katrina Denza.

a year ago today

25 Jun

My darling son, my heart, was born. This morning I am up with the birds and reliving every moment of it: The fear, the expectation, the excitement.

The joy that eclipses all other joy.

That moment when he is held up before you and he opens his mouth to say, “It is me. I am here. Pay attention.”

And forever more, he is where your attention goes.

The weather forecast says today is the pick of the week and today we will go to the ocean, the three of us. We will go to the ocean and we will eat cake and we will remember each day that led us to this glorious day when the birds’ first song was a birthday song.

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