Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table
Edited by Amanda Hesser
Norton
This absolutely delicious smorgasbord of 26 essays by writers as diverse as Dorothy Allison and Pico Iyer and a lot more in between – including a poem by Billy Collins – can be summed up in two sentences from the editor: “The food doesn’t matter, really. What it evokes does.”
Playwright Jon Robin Baitz, writing about South Africa in the 1970s and his memory of Durban curry, leaves the reader with a not-so-gentle reminder of the apartheid era, as uncomfortable as a suppressed belch at the table.
And when the novelist Dorothy Allison writes of mothering and childhood, the food is, as the song says, “just gravy on the table”. - Donald Paul