FP Staff List: Celebrating TASTES LIKE WAR with food memoirs
The daughter of an American marine and a Korean club hostess, Grace M. Cho grew up between two worlds. Throughout her childhood, Grace watched her mother, Koonja, use food both to assimilate and to assert her identity within their rural Pacific Northwest town. Koonja searched Washington State for napa cabbage, sold wild blackberries she had foraged, and hosted parties that featured stuffed mushrooms and crudités alongside Korean barbecued beef. But everything changed when Koonja began to exhibit symptoms of schizophrenia.
TASTES LIKE WAR is Grace’s chronicle of her decades-long journey to understand her mother’s illness. As Koonja’s appetite dwindled, Grace learned how to cook the food of her mother’s childhood—jangjorim, saengtae jjigae, chapssal tteok, and more—as a way to bridge the gaps between past and present, and more fully connect with the woman behind the diagnosis. Powerful and illuminating,TASTES LIKE WAR navigates the realities of diaspora, trauma, and mental illness while celebrating the life-affirming power of family, tradition, and, of course, food.
In celebration of Grace’s incredible memoir hitting shelves on May 18, the FP staff has gathered our favorite memoirs that center food, from Michelle Zauner’s CRYING IN H MART to Michael W. Twitty’s THE COOKING GENE.
Crying in H Mart
by Michelle Zauner (Knopf)
This book came on my radar because I've been following Michelle's band, Japanese Breakfast, for years. I love seeing Michelle perform live for the same reason I love the way she writes—she has this kind of boundless energy, and a literally and figuratively voracious appetite for life apparent in her every expression. Like Tastes Like War, it's a powerful addition to Asian diaspora literature that uses food as a portal through which to access deeper understandings of identity and familial history.
—Isla
Heartburn
by Nora Ephron (Knopf)
If you listen to it on tape, you'll get to hear Meryl Streep read an entire book!
—Nick
Stealing Buddha’s Dinner
by Bich Minh Nguyen (Penguin Books)
An absolute classic. This memoir will resonate with anyone who, growing up, wrestled with the idea that only eating hamburgers, casseroles, and brownies made you a "real" person.
—Jackie
The Raging Skillet
by Chef Rossi (Feminist Press)
This heartfelt and hilarious memoir is peppered with delicious recipes, including one for a Snickers and Potato Chip casserole which is... *chef's kiss.* A must-read that will give you the munchies!
—Lucia
Blood, Bones & Butter
by Gabrielle Hamilton (Random House)
This isn't your traditional food memoir! Intimate, addictive, and sharply written, Hamilton's story is a must read.
—Lauren
Kitchen Confidential
by Anthony Bourdain (Ecco)
Reading this book for the first time after his passing, I realized how much Bourdain's own perspectives changed during his lifetime, as his platform got bigger and he learned more about his own positioning. It's impossible to be an Asian American millennial and not love him; he was the first television personality that seemed to really love all this food that I had grown up being made fun of for, in a way that respected both how far it was from his own background while celebrating it as something everyone should appreciate.
—Jisu
The Cooking Gene
by Michael W. Twitty (Amistad)
In The Cooking Gene, Twitty chronicles his Black and white ancestry through Southern cuisine and its integral position within the American culinary tradition. This memoir isn’t just about healing from the traumas of your past, but reveling in the power that food has to bring America together.
—Yannise
Tastes Like War
by Grace M. Cho (Feminist Press)
An exquisite commemoration and a potent reclamation.
—Booklist (starred review)