I Do Love a Punny Title

I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of food memoirs as their own thing. I’ve read a few, and I have a whole shelf on my Goodreads labeled “food related”, but I just never quite made the connection until Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge included reading one and I had no trouble at all picking a couple to put on my to read list (most were there already). Cannonball Read loves Lucy Knisley, so I decided to start with hers.

Because graphic memoirs and novels aren’t really my cup of tea,I kept forgetting to stop and actually LOOK at the images that Knisley, a trained artist, spent so much time crafting for me to look at. I feel like a bad reader when it comes to this format. And it isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy it, I absolutely did (please note 4-star rating), I just knew the entire time that I was probably missing about half the humor, because it’s all in the visuals. Knisley’s art might appear simplistic, but in reality its layered and precise.

Knisley tells us the story of her life, from roughly birth (or actually, from before that) to about 22. She uses food, cooking, eating, and her mother as various framing devices for her narrative. Each chapter is its own story, and probably readable separate from the book as a whole. Each chapter is capped with a recipe, with fun, drawn instructions, that will be sure to make you hungry if the contents of the chapters haven’t already. (Seriously, I was not feeling 100% all weekend and not hungry at all, until reading this book on the couch all afternoon, then I was ravenous. The book may have cured me.)

I found the tone of this work to suit its contents, it’s a book about growing up, and the food memories that link that story together. It was also quietly charming and amusing. I don’t know if I’ll be picking up more Knisley anytime soon (although her other books look great) but I can say that this one is worth your time.