Memoir Monday... This Monday it's all about food

 

There's something about a memoir about a "foodie" that I think just resonates with everyone. We all eat, right?! We all have a relationship with food and I'm sure we all have memories of eating, cooking, cooking disasters. Ever since I read Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise by Ruth Reichl  I have loved memoirs about cooks and critics alike. When I received an invitation to read Zahra Tangorra's memoir, Extra Sauce I jumped at the chance! 

Here's the blurb from the publisher...

"A raw and raucous memoir from chef and writer Zahra Tangorra about the great meals and great loves of her life, reflecting on family, friendship, grief, and the solace that can be found through food

At twenty-two years old, Zahra Tangorra was trying on adulthood and attempting to find herself when a harrowing near-death experience stopped her in her tracks. It felt like a twisted version of a second chance. Who am I? she asked herself. What do I love? The answers started coming to her: Stuffed shells and giant meatballs at J&J’s, the Italian red sauce joint of her Long Island childhood. Her mother’s chocolate mousse pie and her father’s sweet and savory pea soup. The people, places, and experiences that made her her, the relationships both loving and fraught—they were all, for better and sometimes worse, inextricably bound up with food.

In this memoir that celebrates both the delicious and the messy in life, Zahra reckons with the adrenaline-filled highs and devastating lows of opening cult-favorite Brooklyn restaurant Brucie and then closing it at the height of its popularity. From cooking her father his last meal and the unexpected yet beautiful things she found at the bottom of her grief to the relationships she couldn’t save through cooking, like her fractured family and the lover she had to leave in Tuscany, Zahra writes about the immense courage it takes to allow ourselves to be loved, extra sauce and all."

You'll have to hold the sauce until April 26, 2026, when Extra Sauce by Zahra Tangorra is available from your local bookstore! Published by The Dial Press an imprint of Random House.

Memoir Monday and... The Violet Hour: Great Writers At The End by Katie Roiphe

From one of our most perceptive and provocative voices comes a deeply researched account of the last days of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, and James Salter—an arresting and wholly original meditation on mortality.

In The Violet Hour, Katie Roiphe takes an unexpected and liberating approach to the most unavoidable of subjects. She investigates the last days of six great thinkers, writers, and artists as they come to terms with the reality of approaching death, or what T. S. Eliot called “the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea.”

Roiphe draws on her own extraordinary research and access to the family, friends, and caretakers of her subjects. Here is Susan Sontag, the consummate public intellectual, who finds her commitment to rational thinking tested during her third bout with cancer. Roiphe takes us to the hospital room where, after receiving the worst possible diagnosis, seventy-six-year-old John Updike begins writing a poem. She vividly re-creates the fortnight of almost suicidal excess that culminated in Dylan Thomas’s fatal collapse at the Chelsea Hotel. She gives us a bracing portrait of Sigmund Freud fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna only to continue in his London exile the compulsive cigar smoking that he knows will hasten his decline. And she shows us how Maurice Sendak’s beloved books for children are infused with his lifelong obsession with death, if you know where to look.

The Violet Hour is a book filled with intimate and surprising revelations. In the final acts of each of these creative geniuses are examples of courage, passion, self-delusion, pointless suffering, and superb devotion. There are also moments of sublime insight and understanding where the mind creates its own comfort. As the author writes, “If it’s nearly impossible to capture the approach of death in words, who would have the most hope of doing it?” By bringing these great writers’ final days to urgent, unsentimental life, Katie Roiphe helps us to look boldly in the face of death and be less afraid.

There have been numerous "death and dying" memoirs lately; When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, and Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande to name just two. Here comes another book on "death". The Violet Hour by Katie Roiphe has gotten wonderful reviews: "Profound", "Poetic", "Tender", but still I hesitate to add this to my own TBR list. Am I tired of reading about "death" no matter how beautifully written in can be? I offer this in Memoir Monday because it has garnered wonderful reviews. Published by The Dial Press at the beginning of March. I still might add this to my wish list.

Mr. Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt... A Review

Did you know that Winston Churchill suffered from depression? Author Rebecca Hunt very cleverly uses this bit of information to create a literary character out of Winston Churchill's real life & well known depression which he affectionately referred to as The Black Dog. Depression is personified as a BIG black dog, who calls himself Black Pat, that can talk and has meaningful conversations with both Churchill, who is soon to retire from Parliament and is suffering with the decision and Esther Hammerhans, a young librarian in the House of Commons, who has advertised for a lodger, and gets Black Pat answering her notice.

Black Pat claims he is in need of a room, close to work. But once "Black Pat" moves in, Esther can't help but wonder if he is coming to stay with her for another reason. You see Esther lost her dear husband almost a year ago, and as the anniversary of his death nears, Esther can feel the pull of Black Pat. There's something enticing about him, at the same time revolting. And he can be so charming when he wants to be...

"Let me stay."

A heavy uncertain stare from Esther. Above the orange light and the chaos of the kitchen grew a thin sadness, the empty sadness of a dying relationship. Here it was unstoppably. Black Pat fawned his chops against the wall with a moan.

Esther said, "Sorry?"

That old Romeo, what he said next was shameless. He said it slowly and full of clues. "If you let me love you it will be the longest love of your life."

The book is quirky, fun and Rebecca Hunt does a clever job of representing depression as a living breathing ugly creature. In her dialogue between the characters she plays with the subtleties of real depression, in a quiet respectful way. The characters are "proper English subjects", keeping a stiff upper lip even in the throws of trouble, keeping their emotions in check until lured into conversation with Black Pat, who is also Mr. Chartwell, which is a reference to Winston Churchill's home which was called Chartwell. Mr. Churchill is believable as a stoic leader, quietly suffering. And Esther is also believable as a proper English widow. When the story lines of Winston Churchill and the "proper" English librarian finally meet, it is with some unexpected and wonderful twists. Black Pat eventually reveals his real relationship with his "clients" as well.

I really enjoyed this book. It wasn't the kind of book where you are turning the pages as fast as you can, but the kind of book that you sit down to read in a big comfy chair, with a steaming cup of tea for company. I loved Esther, who is demure, but finally comes through at the end to show she's got real spunk! But all the characters are memorable. And Rebecca Hunt's writing is wonderful.

I highly recommend Mr. Chartwell to anyone who enjoys literary fiction. This would also make a perfect Reading Group choice, as it really is rich with the meat of good conversation. I want to thank the folks at Random House & The Dial Press for sending along a copy of Mr. Chartwell for review! I can see this being a favorite read.

Mr. Chartwell will be available from your local bookstore Feb. 8th! *P.S. This book will be Kindle Ready!