Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home [Hardcover]

Kim Sunee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 8, 2008

Already hailed as "brave, emotional, and gorgeously written" by Frances Mayes and "like a piece of dark chocolate--bittersweet, satisfying, and finished all too soon" by Laura Fraser, author of An Italian Affair, this is a unique memoir about the search for identity through love, hunger, and food.

Jim Harrison says, "TRAIL OF CRUMBS reminds me of what heavily costumed and concealed waifs we all are. Kim Sunée tells us so much about the French that I never learned in 25 trips to Paris, but mostly about the terrors and pleasure of that infinite octopus, love. A fine book."

When Kim Sunée was three years old, her mother took her to a marketplace, deposited her on a bench with a fistful of food, and promised she'd be right back. Three days later a policeman took the little girl, clutching what was now only a fistful of crumbs, to a police station and told her that she'd been abandoned by her mother.

Fast-forward almost 20 years and Kim's life is unrecognizable. Adopted by a young New Orleans couple, she spends her youth as one of only two Asian children in her entire community. At the age of 21, she becomes involved with a famous French businessman and suddenly finds herself living in France, mistress over his houses in Provence and Paris, and stepmother to his eight year-old daughter.

Kim takes readers on a lyrical journey from Korea to New Orleans to Paris and Provence, along the way serving forth her favorite recipes. A love story at heart, this memoir is about the search for identity and a book that will appeal to anyone who is passionate about love, food, travel, and the ultimate search for self.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

On making Sunee's acquaintance in the introduction to this charming memoir, it's hard not to envy the young woman swimming laps in the pool overlooking the orchard of her petit ami's vast compound in the High Alps of Provence, but below the surface of this portrait is a turbulent quest for identity. Abandoned at age three in a Korean marketplace, Sunee is adopted by an American couple who raise her in New Orleans. In the 1990s she settles, after a fashion, in France with Olivier Baussan, a multimillionaire of epicurean tastes and—at least in her depiction—controlling disposition. She struggles to create a home for herself in the kitchen, cooking gargantuan meals for their large circle of friends, until her restive nature and Baussan's impatience with her literary ambitions compel her to move on. The gutsy Cajun and ethereal French recipes that serve as chapter codas are matched by engaging storytelling. Alas, for all Sunee's preoccupation with the geography of home, her insights on the topic are disappointingly slight, and the facile wrapup offered in the form of resolution seems a shortcut in a book that traverses so much rocky terrain. (Jan.)
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From Booklist

Twentysomething Sunee seems to have it all: beauty, talent, and a charming, wealthy, and very attentive French lover. So why is she so miserable? In this sensuous, somewhat self-indulgent memoir, Sunee, who was born in South Korea, recounts her tragic beginnings (her mother abandoned her when she was 3), her pleasant but far-from-perfect upbringing with her adoptive family in New Orleans, and her passionate love affair with 40-year-old French entrepreneur Olivier Baussan, who travels the globe and owns a sprawling residence in Provence. Whenever she feels lonely, panicked, or out of place, Sunee finds solace in preparing gourmet meals. But time in Olivier's kitchen brings her no closer to discovering who she really is. A trip to South Korea proves disastrous (Sunee has not a scrap of information about her parents or siblings). Meanwhile, Olivier becomes more controlling by the day. Sunee serves up mouthwatering descriptions of food and a generous helping of recipes. But her narrative, attempting to mix personal memoir and foodie lit, lacks the subtlety and sophistication of M. F. K. Fisher and Frances Mayes, both masters of the form. Block, Allison

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing; First Edition edition (January 8, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446579769
• ISBN-13: 978-0446579766
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 1.3 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (81 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #971,423 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 53 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing June 14, 2008

By Carolina Summer

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Kim Sunee can write well enough, and the premise of this book is intriguing. But over the course of the pages, I grew to find her less appealing, and found the book increasingly less engaging as the story seems to become repetitive and lose focus.

I think that primary allure of this book for the publisher was that the main character has a relationship with the Olivier Baussan, the founder of L'Occitaine. (If he'd been just a regular French businessman, I doubt this book would have received write ups in the New York Times.) He meets Kim, falls in love and brings her to Provence. There, she lives an enviable life that is the stuff of Peter Mayle books. They purchase an apartment in Paris and they take trips all over the world. For Kim, the sensitive poet, he even opens up a bookstore dedicated to poetry for her on the Ille St. Louis. But it isn't enough for Kim. In her 20s, she feels smothered by the domestic nature of her life and relationship with her older lover, who is portrayed as a controlling, if well meaning, mentor. Fair enough. I could sympathize that her life may have taken on the frame of a gilded cage.

Where this story becomes troubled is about one third of the way through, when the author moves away from Olivier to live in Paris on her own. For one, she's been a stepmother to his young daughter and she just walks out on her. From the book, it appears she never even sees the little girl again. I found this a surprisingly callous move from someone whose own issues come from being abandoned by her mother in Korea at age three. Olivier calls pleading for her return. Clearly, they continue to have a connection and Kim seems to enjoy his calls, but instead she dates a series of men. But then, she is enraged when she finds he takes on a lover. So she's agnostic about her relationship with Olivier until she can't have him -- then feels rejected when he's already moved on.

But even so, around this point, she lost me. To be fair, the above is an old story of flawed human emotion that some of us have experienced, and more likely when we're immature and in our 20s. But it doesn't make good or compelling reading in this case. In this long section of the book, I felt like I was reading a cleaned up version of her diary or journal, and kept wondering why her editor didn't pare parts of this down.

I expected this story to end with some kind of resolution, but there really isn't any. After some 300 pages, I was left with the feeling that there was no discovery of what home truly meant, nor any breakthrough in self awareness on the author's part. As a result, there was no such conclusion for me as a reader.

I left the book feeling that Kim is probably a nice person, even though this book makes her sound a bit self absorbed and even a touch shallow. Perhaps she needed more time away from this period in her life to have a more insightful take on it, and to offer more reflective takeaways from other adoptees who also have issues with the concept of "home."

31 of 35 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Overwrought recipes, boring existential crisis July 6, 2008

By Jennifer Godwin

Format:Hardcover

OK, here's the deal. I get the quarterlife existential crisis, I do. But when you're suffering said crisis in Provence at your sugar daddy's villa, and you have no job, no responsibilities and no sense of humor--and then you write a mopey 350-page book about it--that crisis becomes unrelatable and obnoxious.

While she's sunning naked on Corsica, she feels isolated and unloved. OK, that's legit, but her vague misery, as conveyed through Sunee's admittedly excellent writing, means that I don't even get to enjoy Corsica by extension!

The sights and smells and tastes of Provence sound wonderful, but the extended descriptions of cunnilingus by her old, rich French boyfriendm and her interpersonal relationships in general are just tiresome, exhausting and as unfulfilling for the reader as they are for Sunee. As a rule, none of the humans in this memoir are drawn half as well as the dishes. You don't get a real sense of what the people look like, where they came from or what contributes to their various flavors.

I found myself sympathizing with the mother she finds so critical and cold. The mother obviously is trying but failing to convey the absence of substance and maturity in her daughter's life, but Sunee is so angry (she claims her sister is the angry one, but it's obviously her), that she ignores the warning entirely.

For that matter, I couldn't figure out for the life of me what she saw in any of her boyfriends other than privilege and heavy-handed, controlling gift-giving and empty promises of salvation. She was young. I get that, too. Almost all young women have made the same mistaken emotional investments, but she doesn't seem to learn anything, she doesn't have any wisdom to convey after having survived the suffocation of the bell jar, she isn't more interesting or wiser after it all, she just speaks French fluently and is passably continental.

Basically, this book is too long, the author is too self-serious, and the life lived is too self-indulgent and spoiled to be genuinely interesting to anyone but the writer and her immediate family.

I was expecting M.F.K. Fisher, Betty McDonald or Mildred Armstrong Kalish, but this woman, articulate though she may be, doesn't come close to achieving their level of perception, wisdom or general literary appeal. I don't recommend this one. Sorry.

28 of 33 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Tasty reading February 13, 2008

By W. Parker

Format:Hardcover

It's not unusual for young, attractive, intelligent, and talented young women to enter relationships with older, successful, rich men. If the women are ambitious enough, they often get tired of the strictures in such relationships and leave to pursue self-directed lives. Kim Sunee's book is a variant on this kind of story with a number of added twists. An orphan abandoned in Korea at a young age, Kim was adopted by an American family and grew up in New Orleans. She cared about her parents and other family members but seemed destined to leave early and pursue an independent life. Her subsequent experiences in Europe make interesting reading, especially as her culinary expertise undergoes a transition from Cajun to Continental cuisine and recipes for various dishes are given at the end of each chapter. This is a book as much about love of eating as it is about love of men. Most of the book is devoted to her relationship of several years with an older, rich French businessman and their indulgent lifestyle, with homes in Paris and Provence. He has various plans for her life with him including purchase of a bookstore for poetry books, but eventually this confinement proves too much and a painful separation ensues.
Kim searches unsuccessfully for her past, her origin in Korea, and this theme appears repeatedly as her lack of firm identity continues and she tries to come to grips with never finding her natural parents. Her fruitless trip to Korea is a painful reminder. I found myself trying to imagine growing up with the pain of being an orphan, yet at the same time somewhat deplored her perhaps undeserved indulgent lifestyle in France. I did enjoy the details of her Provencal life - the foods, the people, the towns and weather - reminding me of my own time spent there with my wife and parents. I liked her ability to add French conversational words and phrases, smoothly followed in most cases by easy English translations.
Kim is still a work in progress and another reviewer makes a good point in describing this book as perhaps somewhat premature. Kim may be finding her own voice, yet hers is still an engaging story worth reading. She has plenty of potential and I look forward to her future writings.