About book Crazy In The Kitchen: Food, Feuds, And Forgiveness In An Italian American Family (2004)
Every time we take our fall trip to the Hudson Valley, we stop by the Culinary Institute of America. This trip we visited the gift shop and I felt inspired to check out this book from the sale rack. It's about a woman who grew up in the 50s and 60s in suburban NJ with a mother who loved anything canned or processed and a grandmother from Italy who made "peasant food" and disdained the evils of Wonder bread and all the other food products of the time.::I wanted to love this book, but I found it didn't hold my attention. I didn't find any of the characters particularly engaging (they're real life people, so I guess that's not their fault...) and I also felt that there were lots of loose ends and undeveloped story lines. The author would refer to things multiple times throughout the book, but it was as if the reader was supposed to already know things about her family as the details were never provided. Major shifts happened in family dynamics, but they were never explained. I liked the idea of the book a lot, but felt that the execution left a lot to be desired.
All my aunts and uncles (6 of them, 9 if you count the steps) spoke with heavy accents, but growing up I never questioned why I never heard them speak either Sicilian or Italian, nor did anyone ever talk about their lives in Sicily or when they first came to Brooklyn. This book is not the story of my family, except in certain similarities of situation, yet in many ways it has helped me to understand the silence I grew up with. The silence I didn’t know was silence until long after I was an adult.
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The only book by Louise DeSalvo I'd read (and still own) is one on writing as a healing process. It's wonderful, and I've recommended it to, and used it in, writing workshops I've facilitated over the years. So I saw this book and wanted to check out DeSalvo's own memoir writing. It became obvious, reading this book, how writing aided in her own personal healing processes. Lotsa clashes at home between an Italian immigrant grandmother who cooks the Old Country recipes and a mother who has fallen for the convenience food generation's offerings. A story about family roots and struggles, and growing into her own foodie experience. I enjoyed it. My copy is an "uncorrected proof" that I bought in a used book store but I expect it could be found on Amazon. A worthwhile read.
—Marilyn
