The Comfort Food Diaries, Emily Nunn
The Comfort Food Diaries, Emily Nunn
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The Comfort Food Diaries
My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart

Author: Emily Nunn

Narrator: Candace Thaxton

Unabridged: 11 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/26/2017


Synopsis

A former New Yorker editor chronicles her journey to heal old wounds and find comfort in the face of loss through travel, friends and family, and home-cooked meals in this memoir “full of warm, bracing honesty…humor and paradox…and sprinkled liberally with the type of recipes that will make book club members say, ‘I could make that!’” (Booklist, starred review).

One life-changing night, reeling from her beloved brother’s sudden death, a devastating breakup with her handsome engineer fiancé, and eviction from the apartment they shared, Emily Nunn had lost all sense of family, home, and financial security.

After a few glasses of wine, heartbroken and unmoored, Emily—an avid cook and professional food writer—poured her heart out on Facebook. The next morning she woke up with an awful 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. Her wonderfully idiosyncratic family comes 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 Great-Grandmother’s Mean Lemon Cake, Nunn experiences the healing power of comfort food—and offers up dozens of recipes for the wonderful meals that saved her life. “The Comfort Food Diaries is nothing less than a tour de force by Emily Nunn, our most hilarious and touching food writer. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry...and you’ll get hungry” (Mark Bittman, author of How to Cook Everything).

About Emily Nunn

Emily Nunn is a freelance food writer and home-cooking evangelist living in North Carolina. She worked for almost a decade at The New Yorker, where she was an arts editor covering both theater and restaurants (she created Tables for Two, the magazine’s restaurant column) and as an award winning features reporter at the Chicago Tribune. Her writing about the arts has been featured in Vogue, Men’s Vogue, Elle, Details, Departures; her food writing has been featured in Food and Wine, Men’s Vogue, and the Chicago Tribune Magazine, among other publications. She is the author of The Comfort Food Diaries.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Sarah on September 26, 2017

Prepare to be hungry.If you can get through this book without craving many of the recipes, I commend you. Unfortunately, they're mostly beyond my skills or lack thereof in the kitchen, so craving is as far as it will go for me. My only experience is with quick recipes with fewer ingredients purely......more

****4 STARS**** This book made me hungry and not just for food as the recipes are to die for. I found myself longing to visit and travel more to the places and countries that mean the most to me. The storyline is very unique and intriguing. I have never read a story so attached to food/love/art/pain/......more

Goodreads review by Wendi on August 19, 2017

I have a secret love of food memoirs. I devoured Ruth Reichl's memoirs, and read my way through the Carnegie Library's impressive collection. But "The Comfort Food Diaries" was often a hard and uncomfortable journey. Emily Nunn was an editor for the New York Times. She wrote about theater and food, b......more

Goodreads review by Jenny on December 24, 2017

I spent most of this book wishing I had stopped reading it sooner - it is hard for me to read a book in 2017 that has such an uninterrogated, unquestioned nostalgia for a white south. I understand that this was Nunn's personal journey throughout her past and towards healing, but the barely-there asi......more

Goodreads review by Deb (Readerbuzz) on November 12, 2017

Emily Nunn loses her brother to suicide and breaks up with her fiancé, and in one night she finds herself without a family or home or income. She sets out on a quest to put her world back together again by visiting friends and learning how to cook their favorite comfort meals. I loved the stories, a......more