Emily Nunn

Certain memoirs grab me but if you add a foodie element to the mix, count me in. This was a well written accounting of Emily Nunn's journey and healing process after her brother's suicide, the lack of emotional support from her significant other and facing alcoholism.

Some of my random thoughts after reading this book:

*Every one us deals with loss and death differently. Some are stoic, some fall apart at every little thing and others keep it together only to collapse emotionally later.

*She deleted Oliver's messages without listening to them! Both of my siblings are now deceased but neither took their lives. Not that it would have played a factor as far as unheard/unread messages from them. When I read that part I actually exclaimed aloud, "She deleted the messages! Why would she do that?"
Because I placed myself in that situation, and I would have reacted differently. No right or wrong about it, everyone deals differently.

*The breakup was so cold and one sided with emotion. I tried to consider the very small amount of empathy with a side of annoyance The Engineer displayed when he was confronted with Emily's grief? It was so black and white and zero gray areas for him.

*Checking into the hospital - that scene where Emily needed to go and had the strength to know it, to act on it, was pure raw emotion.

*The scenes where she and her sister Elaine visit their father was good yet sad. I miss my father, he's been gone over 10 years now but the proverbial heartstrings are pulled now and then, especially when I read those chapters. I had quite a bit of empathy for the father and how they left off with his portion of the story.

*Maggie, the rescue poodle, actually belonged to Emily's sister Elaine. This wasn't clear to me in the beginning of the book and I fretted about Maggie for a bit, worried she was abandoned again. But she wasn't, she is Elaine's dog and was cared for.

I swear, characters can die in books but nothing tears me up like an animal who gets abused, abandoned or killed. That makes me cry. Yeah, I'm like that.

All the talk about food had me inspired to cook and bake. I made French bread, always a favorite here, and slow roasted tomatoes. There were soooo many recipes in this book. That's all I have.

Thoughts from anyone who read this one? Did you like it?… (more)

Emily Nunn, a former New Yorker magazine editor, was in love and living with her fiance`, "the Engineer" she called him, and his lovely young daughter in Chicago. While on vacation in Barcelona, she got word that her brother Gil had committed suicide.

Emily was devastated and the Engineer was upset that Emily couldn't just snap out of her depression and move on. The Engineer broke up with her and she lost her fiance, his daughter, her home and had no job. She began to drink heavily, and one night she poured out her heartache on Facebook.

The next morning, she discovered many of her Facebook friends had responded to her post, asking Emily to come visit them. Her sister Elaine got Emily into the Betty Ford Clinic to deal with her alcohol problem, and took charge of Emily when she got out of rehab.

But things soured quickly. In Emily's family, her mother and one of sisters didn't speak to anyone else in the family. Elaine would decide not to speak to Emily for long periods of time, and Emily never knew why. Emily grew up "in a family of seven- an exquisitely dysfunctional southern family, in various members stopped speaking for years in various convoluted and confusing configurations."

Emily decided to go on on comfort food tour. She would travel the country, visiting various extended family and friends, and that led to her memoir The Comfort Food Diaries: My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart. She stayed with an aunt and uncle in Virginia, trying to learn why her family acted the way that they did. Childhood pals, high school friends, college chums, cousins- they all invited Emily to come visit and cook with them.

The Comfort Food Diaries is part food memoir, part travel guide, part family story, and part self-discovery story, filled with wonderful recipes for the food that nourishes the appetite and the soul. Emily found that she wasn't the only one who had been hurt, and she discovered the resilience to face her life head-on.

The most moving part of the story was when Emily and Elaine went to see their long-estranged father. He was suffering from dementia, lonely and living amid squalor . He had left the family when Emily was a young girl after her mother had taken up with another man and he moved out. It was heartbreaking to hear his story.

There are so many fabulous recipes in this book that I want to try- Toni's Tomato Sauce, Great-grandmother's Mean Lemon Cake, Bea's Magic Salad Dressing, Aunt Mariah's Pot Roast, Magnificient Sour Cream Corn Muffins- it is a nice mix of traditional family, and more modern restaurant fare.

If you like memoirs about families and food, The Comfort Food Diaries is a good read for you. I recommend it.… (more)