num_pages: 320
description: In the tradition of Elizabeth Gilbert and Ruth Reichl former New Yorker editor Emily Nunn chronicles her journey to heal old wounds and find comfort in the face of loss through travel home-cooked food and the company of friends and family.One life-changing night still reeling from her beloved brother's sudden death a few weeks earlier Emily Nunn was dumped by her handsome architect fiance and evicted from the apartment they shared losing in the same moment all sense of family home and financial security. After a few glasses of wine heartbroken and lost Emily an avid cook and professional food writer poured her heart out on Facebook. The next morning she woke up with a terrible hangover and a feeling she'd made a terrible mistake only to discover she had more friends than she knew many of whom invited her to come visit and cook with them while she put her life back together. Thus began the Comfort Food Tour.Searching for a way forward Emily travels the country cooking and staying with relatives and friends among them renowned chefs Mark Bittman and Ina Garten. She also travels back to revisit scenes from her dysfunctional Southern upbringing dominated by her dramatic unpredictable mother and her silent disengaged father. Her wonderfully idiosyncratic aunts and uncles and cousins come to life in these pages all part of the rich Southern story in which past and present are indistinguishable food is a source of connection and identity and a good story is often preferred to a not-so-pleasant truth. But truth pleasant or not is what Emily Nunn craves and with it comes an acceptance of the losses she has endured and a sense of hope for the future.In the salty snap of a single Virginia ham biscuit in the sour tang of Grandmother's Lemon Cake Nunn experiences the healing power of comfort food and offers up dozens of recipes for the wonderful meals that saved her life. With the biting humor of David Sedaris and the emotional honesty of Cheryl Strayed Nunn delivers a moving account of her descent into darkness and her gradual hard-won return to the living.
language: English
title: The Comfort Food Diaries: My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart
publisher: Atria Books