Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger

I'm Glad My Mom Died

Jennette McCurdy · 320 pages

A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor—including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother—and how she retook control of her life. Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a

Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

Michelle Zauner · 256 pages

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her gra

When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

Monica Wood · 235 pages

A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table

Molly Wizenberg · 320 pages

Author of the internationally famous blog, Orangette, Molly Wizenberg recounts a life with the kitchen at its center. From her mother's pound cake, a staple of summer picnics during her childhood in Oklahoma, to the eggs she cooked for her father during the weeks before his death, food and memories are intimately entwined.

Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table

Ruth Reichl · 294 pages

For better or worse, almost all of us grow up at the table. It is in this setting that Ruth Reichl's brilliantly written memoir takes its form. For, at a very early age, Reichl discovered that "food could be a way of making sense of the world . . . if you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were." Tender at the Bone is the story of a life determined, enhanced, and defined in eq

My Life in France

Julia Child, Alex Prud'Homme · 344 pages

Julia Child singlehandedly created a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she was not always a master chef. Indeed, when she first arrived in France in 1948 with her husband, Paul, who was to work for the USIS, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the coun

A Year in Provence

Peter Mayle · 207 pages

In this witty and warm-hearted account, Peter Mayle tells what it is like to realize a long-cherished dream and actually move into a 200-year-old stone farmhouse in the remote country of the Lubéron with his wife and two large dogs. He endures January's frosty mistral as it comes howling down the Rhône Valley, discovers the secrets of goat racing through the middle of town, and delights in the glo

From Here, You Can't See Paris: Seasons of a French Village and Its Restaurant

Michael S. Sanders · 344 pages

A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway · 209 pages

A Moveable Feast is a 1964 memoir belles-lettres by American author Ernest Hemingway about his years as a struggling expat journalist and writer in Paris during the 1920s. It was published posthumously.[1] The book details Hemingway's first marriage to Hadley Richardson and his associations with other cultural figures of the Lost Generation in Interwar France. The memoir consists of various per

Black Cake

Charmaine Wilkerson · 385 pages

For One More Day

Mitch Albom · 208 pages

In an inspirational debut novel by the author of Tuesdays with Morrie, Charles "Chick" Benetto, grieving over the death of his mother, uses alcohol as a crutch to deal with his loneliness, isolation, and depression and the disintegration of his life, until an encounter with his mother's ghost brings him new awareness and leads him to attempt to put his life back together.

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing

Anya von Bremzen · 338 pages

Born in a surreal Moscow communal apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen, the author grew up singing odes to Lenin, black-marketeering Juicy Fruit gum at school, and longing for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, drab, naively joyous, melancholy and, finally, intolerable.

Boy: Tales of Childhood

Roald Dahl · 176 pages

Boy is an autobiographical book by British writer Roald Dahl. This book describes his life from birth until leaving school, focusing on living conditions in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, the public school system at the time, and how his childhood experiences led him to writing as a career. It ends with his first job, working for Royal Dutch Shell. His autobiography continues in the book Going So

Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen: How One Girl Risked Her Marriage, Her Job, and Her Sanity to Master the Art of Living

Julie Powell · 309 pages

Julie Powell is 30 years old, living in a rundown apartment in Queens and working at a secretarial job that's going nowhere. She needs something to break the monotony of her life, and she invents a deranged assignment. She will cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child's 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. In the span of one year. At first she thinks it will be easy, but as she moves from

Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

Anthony Bourdain · 288 pages

The long-awaited follow-up to the megabestseller Kitchen ConfidentialIn the ten years since his classic Kitchen Confidential first alerted us to the idiosyncrasies and lurking perils of eating out, from Monday fish to the breadbasket conspiracy, much has changed for the subculture of chefs and cooks, for the restaurant business—and for Anthony Bourdain.Medium Raw explores these changes, moving bac

And When Did You Last See Your Father?

Blake Morrison

First published in 1993, Blake Morrison's "And When Did You Last See Your Father?" is an extraordinary portrait of family life, father-son relationships and bereavement. It became a bestseller, and inspired a whole genre of confessional memoirs. This new edition includes a new afterword by the author."And When Did You Last See Your Father?" won the Waterstone's/Volvo/Esquire Award for Non-Fiction

The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest

Aminatta Forna · 403 pages

"Aminatta Forna's intensely personal history is a passionate and vivid account of an African childhood, an idyll that became the stuff of nightmare. As a child she witnessed the upheavals of post-colonial Africa, danger, flight, the bitterness of exile in Britain, and the terrible consequences of her dissident father's stand against tyranny.". "Mohamed Forna was a man of unimpeachable integrity a

My Struggle: Book 1

Karl Ove Knausgard

The Time Traveller

Ronald Mallett, Bruce Henderson · 352 pages

L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food

Roy Choi, Tien Nguyen, Natasha Phan · 340 pages

"Los Angeles: A patchwork megalopolis defined by its unlikely cultural collisions; the city that raised and shaped Roy Choi, the boundary-breaking chef who decided to leave behind fine dining to feed the city he loved--and, with the creation of the Korean taco, reinvented street food along the way. Abounding with both the food and the stories that gave rise to Choi's inspired cooking, L.A. Son tak

Notes from a Small Island

Bill Bryson · 324 pages

After nearly two decades in Britain, Bill Bryson took the decision to move Mrs Bryson, little Jimmy et al. back to the States for a while. But before leaving his much-loved Yorkshire, Bryson insisted on taking one last trip around old Blighty, a sort of valedictory tour of the green and kindly island that had for so long been his home. The resulting book was a eulogy to the country that produced M

They Left Us Everything: A Memoir

Plum Johnson · 279 pages

"A warm, heartfelt memoir of family, loss, and a house jam-packed with decades of goods and memories. After almost twenty years of caring for elderly parents--first for their senile father, and then for their cantankerous ninety-three-year old mother--author Plum Johnson and her three younger brothers have finally fallen to their middle-aged knees with conflicted feelings of grief and relief. Now

Maman's Homesick Pie: A Persian Heart in an American Kitchen

Donia Bijan · 254 pages

""Donia Bijan discovers a way back to home and what it means to belong. A memoir both universal and intimate, anchored in history and lifted by the mysterious elements that only occur in a warm and inviting kitchen." --Marsha Mehran, author Pomegranate Soup For Donia Bijan's family, food has been the language they use to tell their stories and to communicate their love. In 1978, when the Islamic R

Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris

A.J. Liebling · 185 pages

From an interview with thriller writer Jane Ciabattari on LitHub: *"In the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin, M. Mirande would dazzle his juniors, French and American, by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five