On Alicia Kennedy's On Eating

Run, don't walk, to pre-order this wonderful memoir

Last year, as a juror for the National Book Awards, I read more memoir than I’d ever chosen to. It’s not a form that particularly enchanted me. There are a few works of autobiography and memoir that everyone ought to read: Speak, Memory is the highwater mark for me. Primo Levi’s If This is a Man, Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking are the memoirs that I can re-read and feel like I’m unlocking more. Same with Rousseau’s Confessions and Malcolm X’s Autobiography.

In general, though, it was unusual for this kind of book to make it to my best-of list in any given season, in part because I tend to be hungry for ideas when I’m reading non-fiction, and so many memoirs seemed to take forever to get to them.

Yet three of the most beautiful books I read last year were Yiyun Li’s Things In Nature Merely Grow, and Lana Lin’s The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam, and Helen Whybrow’s The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life. Each explored a set of ideas that it wouldn’t have been able to do better in any other way, each presenting lives interrogated and weighed, often through the deepest heartbreak, each an exercise in finding the right language and inventing new sets of ideas to match experience. I was wrong not to have really appreciated this before. Better late than never, I’m enjoying the form far more than I used to.

Enter, then, Alicia Kennedy’s memoir.

On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites

There were a good many first person treatments of food and cooking and restaurant-running and eating in our pile last year — I’m sworn by the terms of the awards not to reveal any specifics beyond the ones we made public — but I’m certain none were as wise, humane, and engaging as On Eating.

As with all her writing, Alicia brings a curiosity, and a capacity to ask difficult questions. Under the microscope are family and intimate relationships, the business of food writing itself, cooking, care and the germinal moments that have made her one of the most important voices in food writing today. The subtitle is apt. She picks her scenes exquisitely, each marked by a transformation, and each looping through a food whose meaning will become all the richer the next time you encounter it. I’ll not give anything away, but if you enjoy any of apples, chocolate, lamb, oysters, martinis, mushrooms, plantains, sugar, pumpkin, grapes, beans, bread, water, or coffee, you’ll find something taste-expanding in Alicia’s magnificent memoir.

Preorder it from your local Indie bookshop or Bookshop.org today. It’s on shelves from 14th April.