Love, Loss, and What We Ate, Padma Lakshmi
Love, Loss, and What We Ate, Padma Lakshmi
16 Rating(s)
List: $26.99 | Sale: $18.89
Club: $13.49

Love, Loss, and What We Ate
A Memoir

Bestseller

Author: Padma Lakshmi

Narrator: Padma Lakshmi

Unabridged: 12 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 03/08/2016

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

A vivid memoir of food and family, survival and triumph, Love, Loss, and What We Ate traces the arc of Padma Lakshmi’s unlikely path from an immigrant childhood to a complicated life in front of the camera—a tantalizing blend of Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone and Nora Ephron’s HeartburnLong before Padma Lakshmi ever stepped onto a television set, she learned that how we eat is an extension of how we love, how we comfort, how we forge a sense of home—and how we taste the world as we navigate our way through it. Shuttling between continents as a child, she lived a life of dislocation that would become habit as an adult, never quite at home in the world. And yet, through all her travels, her favorite food remained the simple rice she first ate sitting on the cool floor of her grandmother’s kitchen in South India.Poignant and surprising, Love, Loss, and What We Ate is Lakshmi’s extraordinary account of her journey from that humble kitchen, ruled by ferocious and unforgettable women, to the judges’ table of Top Chef and beyond. It chronicles the fierce devotion of the remarkable people who shaped her along the way, from her headstrong mother who flouted conservative Indian convention to make a life in New York, to her Brahmin grandfather—a brilliant engineer with an irrepressible sweet tooth—to the man seemingly wrong for her in every way who proved to be her truest ally. A memoir rich with sensual prose and punctuated with evocative recipes, it is alive with the scents, tastes, and textures of a life that spans complex geographies both internal and external.Love, Loss, and What We Ate is an intimate and unexpected story of food and family—both the ones we are born to and the ones we create—and their enduring legacies.

About Padma Lakshmi

Padma Lakshmi is an Emmy-nominated producer, television host, food expert, and a New York Times bestselling author, as well as one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People (2023). She is the creator of the critically-acclaimed and Emmy-nominated Hulu series “Taste the Nation,” which also won a  prestigious James Beard Foundation Award. Lakshmi served as host and executive producer for 19 seasons of Bravo’s two-time Emmy-winning series “Top Chef,”, which has been nominated for 47 Emmys, including her five-time nomination for Outstanding Host for A Reality-Competition Program.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Roxane

This is an interesting memoir because it is so full of yearning and I always appreciate when a writer can lay their desires bare. The narrative certainly meanders, but that isn't a bad thing. There is an interesting lack of structure in how Lakshmi shares her life, from her childhood here in the Uni......more

Goodreads review by Diane

I admired Padma Lakshmi from afar until I read her memoir. It's hard not to be struck by her beauty and well-spoken grace on television. On Top Chef I liked the delicate yet discerning way she tasted the competitors' morsels. I liked that she married Salman Rushdie, a man of substance. I know a whol......more

I really liked Padma from my years of watching Top Chef, so when I saw that she wrote a memoir, I totally wanted to read it. I learned a lot of stuff about her I didn't know, and she spilled enough tea to keep my inner-gossip hound happy. I really enjoyed her little tidbits about India and her India......more