Amazon.com Review
At the risk of sounding sexist, it's impossible to imagine a man writing this book. Nora Seton's warm, savory memoir is unmistakably female in its blend of forthright physical details, painstaking analysis of intricate personal relations, and intellectual musings. In this, the author mirrors her beloved mother, novelist Cynthia Propper Seton: "The human spirit required complications, she said, places to go and not go, ascent and descent, stone walls and smooth paths to organize itself. She explained all this while peeling carrots." Writing with downright elegance that always delivers the unexpected phrase or insight, Seton explores the kitchen's meaning for women as the center of the home--the place where friends gather to drink coffee and share secrets, where children stand on overturned salad bowls to reach knives, where the evening news is absorbed while drinking wine and chopping onions. Seton's memories of her mother's slow death from cancer and the stillbirth of her own first child are poignant but never depressing because she conveys such a palpable sense of life as a process, of experiences that may wound or rejoice but always enrich the soul.
--Wendy Smith
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
In a graceful paean to the pleasures of motherhood, friendship and food, the daughter of novelist Cynthia Seton writes of her admiration for her mother, who raised five children while maintaining a stimulating intellectual life. At the center of their household was cooking, which Seton's mother saw as offering sustenance and hospitality. Seton herself re-creates her mother's life in some ways, reveling in the role of stay-at-home mom to her two young children (another was stillborn), although she is a gifted, published writer as well (The Road to My Farm). Seton's poetic observations (a loaf of bread is as "round and tawny and warm as a cooling ember") and her palpable yearning for her lost child and her mother, who died of leukemia while the author was in college, give this tranquil work a deeper layer of emotional resonance. Like her mother, Seton also places great value on her intense friendships with women. She profiles older friends who appear to be mother substitutesASenta, a Swiss embodiment of European dignity, and Ida, a 90-something practicing therapistAas well as an idealized intellectual exchange with her friend Laura. Coming full cycle, Seton finds herself the confidante of a young college woman. Though the quality of these portraits varies, Seton succeeds in conveying the sustenance each relationship gives her. Author tour. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
