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Life from Scratch

A Memoir of Food, Family, and Forgiveness

Audiobook (Includes supplementary content)
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Sasha Martin set herself a rather ambitious goal: to cook—and eat—her way around the world with 196 recipes from 196 countries in 196 weeks. Enter Global Table Adventure, a project that proves to be more than just a culinary challenge as Sasha attempts to navigate the vicissitudes of marriage, motherhood, and life's failures and successes, all inextricably linked to her troubled past.

For Sasha, food and cooking unlock the memories of a difficult childhood and the loss and heartbreak that came with it. She and her brother lived with their mother in Boston before being placed in foster care with a family in Europe. Among the hard moments of her young life, the most difficult occurred when Sasha was just twelve years old—she witnessed her brother's suicide.

As she mines her past to make sense of her childhood, food allows Sasha to find her own place in the world—and create the home she has been craving her whole life. This is a story about food from around the globe but also about how food can transform us, about being a mother and a wife, about loving the world, and about learning to love ourselves.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 5, 2015
      Martin, a food writer and blogger, spent 195 weeks cooking meals from every country of the world. But the most memorable moments in this spirited narrative take place in the many weeks before those 195, and they have surprisingly little to do with food. The department of social services hovered around Martin’s childhood: her father was absent, her home was so cramped that the kitchen doubled as the living room, and her mother, as people said, was “a troublemaker.” When Martin was a pre-teen, her mother sent her and her brother Michael to live with family friends. Soon thereafter, Michael killed himself. The author made her way to the Culinary Institute of America, as she recounts without self-pity, and then to the cooking project that launched this memoir. Food had long provided the few happy moments in Martin’s life. She recalls her mother’s determination to save their scarce money to buy ingredients for a special cake, and how Martin asked her to “start cooking the world all over again” when they ate their last meal of the 195-week trip, from Zimbabwe. These moments may not be enough to satiate the appetite of foodie readers who are looking for lush bite-by-bite writing, but there is plenty here to engross memoir lovers. Agent Lisa DiMona, Writers House.

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  • English

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