I don't know maybe it was me because I had just lost my adult daughter and then mother but it was difficult for me to into this book as much as I wanted to. I did give it a try three times but just could not keep my mind going along with everything in the book, I am sure others will enjoy it.

This book reminded me of other memoirs I've read--Eat, Pray, Love; It Happens Every Day--but while there was a lot of talk about food and recipes included, I felt that despite so much pain, there was a lot of privilege that helped the author work through the pain of loss and heartbreak and the addiction that came with her coping. Not everyone gets kicked out of a Chicago highrise to a home in one of the richest parts of California with a trip to Betty Ford which was paid by a sibling, then travel the country to heal through cooking and eating. I wanted to connect with the author because of the tragic loss of her sibling and trying to reconcile her experiences and feelings about her family, but I felt a disconnect with her voice and delivery. While I read between the lines, noting her depression, she was extremely high functioning in many ways so I often mentally labeled her as just spoiled, unlike the food she cooked and ate.

While the food that I grew up with is vastly different than what Emily Nunn considers comfort food to be, I share her habit of cooking for comfort. I really enjoyed this book, and found her to be engaging. I'd love to share a meal with her, or even have a long chat over coffee. Fantastic read. (But it made me hungry.)

Emily Nunn had a bad year. She lost her job. The brother she was closest to committed suicide. Her fiance broke up with her, and as if that wasn't enough, he asked her to move out of their joint home, taking away the last of her comfort and her relationship with his daughter, which was her truest joy. She felt like she had nothing left, so she turned to her old frenemy, alcohol. 

In a drunken blurt of emotional information, she shared her heartbreak on Facebook before going to sleep one night. Waking in the morning, she expected to find judgment and disappointment, but instead she discovered a host of friends and family who shared their own stories of heartache and who offered an open house and an open kitchen for Nunn to share. These were the seeds of the Comfort Food Tour. 

Nunn started in California, staying with her brother Michael and sister-in-law Elaine, who insisted that she start out with outpatient therapy at the Betty Ford Clinic while staying at their desert house nearby. Elaine also insisted on a makeover, helping Nunn move further from her painful recent past and starting again with a freshness that she hadn't imagined but that mirrored all the beautiful fresh ingredients she had at hand living in California. 

From there, she goes across the country on a journey of comfort food and self-actualization. Working through some of her old family issues, getting reacquainted with family and friends, and cooking with fresh local ingredients keeps her busy while she figures out what's next in her life. Emily Nunn's The Comfort Food Diaries has amazing recipes along with a level of personal honesty that draws you in to her story and reminds you of your own experiences with heartbreak, healing, and really good food. 

The Comfort Food Diaries has made its way onto a host of best-of lists for 2017, and for good reason. It's inspirational, brutal, and personal, and it is a truly beautiful read. Start the book with your own comfort food at hand and then let your thoughts wander to some of Nunn's creations, from Angel Biscuits to Great-Grandmother's Mean Lemon Cake to Aunt Mariah's Pot Roast to Emily's Shrimp and Grits-Style Risotto. It's a journey of flavor and of personal growth, and it's so worth the trip! 



Galleys for The Comfort Food Diaries were provided by Atria Books through NetGalley, with many thanks.

After her brother’s suicide and a broken engagement, former restaurant critic Emily Nunn hits the road for a comfort food tour (mashed potatoes, anyone?) of her past. On this culinary odyssey, she discovers that cooking doesn’t just fill a stomach, it nourishes the soul. You’ll devour this mouth-watering memoir –and its recipes—in a gulp!

(2.5 stars; DNF @ 25%) Like Life from Scratch by Sasha Martin, this is too heavy on the sad backstory and not quite enough about food – at least in the first quarter, which is all I managed to read. After a dear brother’s suicide, a breakup from her fiancé, and a couple of spells in rehab to kick the alcohol habit that runs in her family, Nunn set off on a quest for what people across the country consider to be comfort food. “I would use food to lead me back to love, to some kind of family.” She starts with a visit to a cousin in the South and some indulgence in ham biscuits and peanut brittle.

The book starts just as Emily's life is starting to crumble. She thought she had built the perfect cozy nest but within the first few pages the cracks are very obvious and that was before she brought up her issues with addiction. As readers we see her at what must have been her lowest point - struggling to not just fix a broken heart but to rewrite her entire outlook on life. A random Facebook post kick starts that journey though it takes a little while and a lot of soul searching for her to really get started.

Not that it takes awhile to get into the food portion of the book. Right from the beginning Nunn is describing food so clearly and so beautifully that that all I want to do is grab a fork and dive in to Ezra Pound Cake, or pizza with Toni's Tomato Sauce. Her descriptions make things that I don't even like sound appealing - I've never once craved a Country Ham biscuit but I'm beginning to reconsider that after several of her mentions!

Once her Comfort Food Tour really got going the food descriptions really increased (seriously - do not read this book hungry!) and the book got a bit happier though no less introspective. I was really intrigued by the question of just what is comfort food. It's a term we hear bandied about quite a bit but everyone's interpretation is so personal that it takes a little soul searching to really figure out your answer. I've been thinking about it since I started the books and am still not quite sure I've really defined mine!

This is a book about self-discovery, healing, and most of all food. Nunn's writing is incredibly honest but not overly dramatic and within the first few pages she felt like a friend. Just be careful not to read while hungry or you might go dashing out in search of a country ham biscuit!

What do you do when your life falls apart and you hit rock bottom?

That's what happened to Nunn after the triple threat of her brother's suicide, breakup with her fiance, and a stint in rehab. Although the idea started almost as a joke, she decided to go on a comfort food tour to be with people who loved her, to cook and be cooked for, and to rediscover who she was.

The tour and the people and places she visits are, in the book, almost an excuse for her reflection on her life as she struggles with her childhood, her past, and her uncertainty about the future. You could almost call it a memoir with recipes.

By the end of the book Nunn has come to terms with herself, with her childhood, and with her family's relationship with her. It certainly is a firmer footing for a life than what she was before. We are left, even so, feeling as if she is a work in progress. We feel as if we know her, but I found myself wondering if she really knows herself.

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 because they're much less time consuming and expensive to make. The story is sad and poignant, written well but didn't speak to me as much as I thought it would. It's hard for most of us to imagine just being able to take off traveling without serious worry about a job after a stay at the famous Betty Ford center which was financed by a family member. I couldn't stop my eyes from widening at descriptions of the writer's childhood home and luxuries either. The disengagement I felt did detract from the book for me. My favorite parts were towards the end and involved her aging father.

Emily hasn't even begun to grieve over the unexpected death of her older brother when she experiences another loss... of her fiance. He's dumped her and tells her she must move out of the place she's made into a home for their little family, which includes his daughter from a previous relationship. She has doted on them both, treating his daughter as a princess. (That's actually all she's referred to as, which got a little irksome.) She had spent the majority of her time cooking elaborate meals for them lovingly. Taking care of them was her job, having left the work writing about food and theater she did before she met Oliver.

When Oliver breaks up with her, she doesn't know what to do or where to go. She tries to find the answers in the bottom of a bottle, which leads to a ranting Facebook post and a trip to a hospital rehab. These both actually end up being good things. The trip has her determined to stop drinking for good, and that Facebook post actually brought to light how much support she has. Old friends from all over the country invite her into their homes. They can cook, they can heal, they can reconnect. It is here that the idea for the Comfort Food Tour is born.

We follow Emily in her travels around the country as she begins to reconnect (or try to reconnect) with her friends and family. All of her friends seem to be well-adjusted and happy, and she struggles to figure out where she went wrong and how she can help herself feel better. There's a lot of great thoughts and quotes in this book, but ultimately it just didn't keep my attention quite as much as I wished it would. It's the first time I've read a food related memoir, and that may be why I struggled a bit. I also haven't read many memoirs of any sort. I would say if this is the kind of book you've enjoyed in the past, you're likely to enjoy this one too.

I received a copy of this book from Net Galley and Atria Books, thank you! My opinion is honest and unbiased.

Given the premise of Emily Nunn's food memoir, I was pretty sure I was going to like it. Then I came upon this passage and I knew I was going to love it:

"Despite my dive into the mysteries of comfort food, my plans were not suddenly tied up in a neat bow. And unlike what you might expect from a story like this, I didn't have a road map for the next year of my life, a rock-solid timeline, or an uncharacteristically smart but rustic man hovering in the wings to make my life happy and perfect again. The truth was that I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life, expect in the short term. And even the short-term was sketchy." p. 62


Emily Nunn is my kind of people.

In the course of her memoir, we see her do the good and hard work of becoming sober, of processing her complicated and often toxic family dynamics, of grieving, of figuring out just who she is. It is not always neat or pretty but it is an honest account of someone taking stock of their life and doing their best to become healthier and stronger. It's worth reading for that alone.

Emily grew up in Galax, VA with two brothers and two sisters. Her parents ultimately divorced and her dad was not very involved with the family afterward. She moved to New York where she covered theater and wrote the original Tables for Two column for the New Yorker before taking a restaurant column job at the Chicago Tribune. Once in Chicago, she met the Engineer, who would become her fiancé, and his 7 year old daughter.

In so many ways, it seemed like Emily had an ideal life. But there were cracks along the surface and they shatter after her brother Oliver committed suicide. Shortly after Oliver's death, the Engineer breaks off their engagement and as Emily had become a stay at home stepmother of sorts, she has to figure out employment and housing. All while recognizing she was an alcoholic, like Oliver was, and she needed help.

After seeking treatment for her alcoholism, this ultimately launches a year or so of staying with different friends around the country, freelancing, and figuring out what she should do with her life and how things got this bad. One friend quips it'll be her comfort food tour. Everywhere Emily stays, she and her friends or family discuss the idea of comfort food. They make favorite recipes for each other. They consider what makes comfort food comforting and why we turn to it when we're in distress or need to celebrate. (One smart person raised the idea of why we associate comfort food with sad things when food is also an important part of many of our happiest moments.)

It made me think about the role of comfort food in such unexpected ways, going beyond my go-to choices. It was interesting to consider what we cook for people when they're in distress and how it's formed by our own ideas of comfort, as well as how "the things people truly need from us at the very worst times in their lives are often much smaller than what we try to give them" (p. 24.)

While Emily has a complicated relationship with her immediate family, her cousin, aunt, and uncle shower her with love and affection and open up their homes to her for extended periods of time. I loved these relatives for being stable presences and for the way they nurtured Emily. I loved how they showed her it's possible to be part of a stable, loving family.

As Emily visits her relatives and reconnects with old friends from college and tries to settle somewhere, her relationship with food evolves. Early on she notes how she cooked to show people how much she loved them or to make them love her. But as she's putting the pieces of her life back together and people give to her when she has little or nothing to give in return, she realizes she has to let people take care of her for a while. In the process of allowing people to love her unconditionally, she becomes more of who she truly is. The contrast between her past relationships and the ones she encounters after Oliver's death was truly striking and I ached over what she'd gone through and settled for.

The Comfort Food Diaries is beautifully written. I'm adding it to my list of favorite food memoirs. Nunn thoughtfully weaves in recipes from her travels and there are many I can't wait to try. The food and her history complement one another and I was truly impressed with her ability to unspool her story in such a seamless way. It may be her Southern heritage but Nunn knows how to tell a story, that's for sure.

Food can't fully mend a broken heart but when someone shows up with a dish or a beverage in our time of need, something does start to knit us back together. If only because that person's presence tells us they see us. We're not alone. We're enough. We'll get through this.

"Food has become my touchstone for understanding what real love is. The best thing? Food makes it easier to give love, untangled. Since it keeps us alive, the smallest, simplest gesture can seem miraculous: I brought you this soup." p. 303

The Comfort Food Diaries by Emily Nunn is about her journey to overcome her brother's sudden death. She is also dealing with the loss of her relationship, her dysfunctional upbringing, and the separation of her family. The book was well-written but take the discussions of the South with a grain of salt. The author was fascinated by real dirt roads. While I have seen many real ones, I have no idea what a fake dirt road would be. I enjoyed the recipes sprinkled throughout the book. Overall I found the book interesting.

Why do I keep doing this to myself?

Along the same vein of Eat, Pray Love and Julie & Julia (and the awful Cleaving), The Comfort Food Diaries follows one woman's journey through life via food.

I really enjoy Nunn's writing but I often find that these types of stories annoy and anger me for some reason. It's nothing personal, it's just...personal for me.

It's good, but .....

Thank to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

I loved the recipes in this book and thought her traveling around and cooking for others was great. But I had a hard time liking Emily Nunn. I believe that food comforts and heals and that it helps her in those ways. But she could be harsh and her fights with addiction were hard to get through. She was harsh around the edges and needed something other than food to soften her up.
I normally love food memoirs but this one just didn't do it for me.

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, before finding herself as a stay-at-home stepmom in Chicago, orchestrating school events and making elaborate meals for her fiance and soon-to-be-stepdaughter. Slowly, Emily's life crumbled. Her brother's death and the disintegration of her newfound domesticity leads her on a road trip quest for comfort food and family, often made daunting when her own family proves again and again to be a cesspool of anger, resentment, and dysfunction.

There are some truly lovely moments in this book, such as Emily's stay with her cousin, Toni, and reconnecting with old college friends. I believe, as Emily does, that food comforts and heals, that it showcases love, and enables real human connections. But I'm not sure the book gets there. The hurt she feels about being abandoned by her family is real and palpable, almost with a harshness that makes you want to look away. Some of the writing is a bit rough (and raw) as well. It was definitely unexpected, for me as a reader. I was expecting something more comforting (as comfort food implies), but what I read instead was almost reminiscent of "The Glass Castle." This isn't a bad thing, just unexpected.

There are also shards of unexplored classicism and a whisper of racism as well. Nunn grew up in the South, with a privileged background, and most of her journey takes place there. Still, there was a tiny scene involving Wal-mart that made me step outside the book and recoil a bit, feeling very much like the colloquial "other." I am 100% sure this is not what the book intended, but I must be honest and say I was uncomfortable while reading the rest of Nunn's memoir.

More than anything, it felt what Nunn was searching for (redemption and perhaps apologies from her family) was always going to elude her, no matter the delicious food she collected. I wanted to give her a hug and a reference to a very good therapist.

What's comfort food to you? What do you make yourself or seek out when you're blue or need soothing? Is it what your family made when you were small, or something far apart from those memories?

In every city or town or village in the United States, down sterile fluorescent grocery store lanes, the standard dishes await you - so-called comfort foods frozen behind glass, calling out to the wounded...meatloaf and mashed potatoes, potpies, tuna-noodle casseroles, giant lasagnas to serve a crowd, single man-size bowls of chili. Iconic dishes fueled by the idea that your mother used to make them for you at home. Or, at the very least, that someone's mother, somewhere, made them for her family, and it soothed them. 

Purchase this processed food memory; thaw it out, heat it up, stuff it down your pie hole, and you'll feel better. And if you don't feel better, well, you can just buy some more. But true comfort food is a much more complicated concept.

In a quick snap of time, Emily Nunn lost all of the things that gave her a foundation, albeit a shaky one, of life. One of her brothers committed suicide, leaving her overwhelmed with grief, regret, and questions, and shortly thereafter her relationship ended, and along with it disappeared her posh Chicago apartment, her beloved stepdaughter, and her tentative grasp on sobriety and reality.

She drank too much again and landed in the famous Betty Ford Clinic as an outpatient, did her stint and then set out slowly, unsurely, to fit together some pieces of what remained of her life, looking for clues to her own identity amidst them. The common thread that she returns to again and again is food. Nunn had been a writer, including a  reviewer of restaurants, for the New Yorker and the Chicago Tribune, and she recognizes her need to cook for people to show how much she loves them with the hopes of being loved back. She's a complicated person who's hurting a lot and who's trying to do her best, as she writes that she thinks most of us are trying to do at any given time. This book is a kind of therapy, for her and by extension for the reader.

Post-rehab, she wanders with her pared-down possessions and taking up friends and relatives on their offers to visit or stay awhile, but worrying she'll become Delta Dawn, the eponymous subject of the famous Helen Reddy or Tanya Tucker country song. I loved that reference. This is a great look at the idea of American comfort food and what it means to different people, and that was such a great marker of Americana.

"Everyone in the world must yearn for the solace associated with home and comfort food, even if they've never experienced it." So she chases this idea, now that she's become unmoored and unrooted, trying on different iterations and seeking ideas of comfort and associated foods from family and friends.

It shouldn't come as any surprise that Nunn's curiosity about comfort food is linked to childhood, and she has a complicated connection to hers. Not because of abuse or similar darkness, rather perceived slights, anger, blame, guilt, lack of communication. All the things that can set one up to be very broken later. She's spent her adult life constantly searching for comfort in various forms.

A  lot of the dishes were familiar and nostalgic. Exploring her familial roots, she mentions scrapple, a dish made by her mother that I think holds strong memories for anyone with roots in the Midatlantic States. If you didn't, according to what she found in the 1969 Dictionary of Cooking, it's "bricklike food combination composed of bits of pork cooked up with cornmeal and herbs; scrapple, supposedly a Philadelphia specialty, is usually sliced and baked or fried for breakfast."

Doesn't appeal? She considers that too, that comfort food can't be universal: "One person's comfort food can easily be another's nightmare. Which is why, when you are trying to comfort someone else, you have to stretch a little in terms of what's appropriate and what's not." Emily spent Thanksgiving with a boyfriend who couldn't wait for his mother's "green salad", not vegetables but a gelatin mold, like from '50s homemaker magazines.  

So many recipes are peppered throughout, linked by familial or friendly connections, or the deeply revealing personal stories someone has told Nunn about what comfort food means to them. This is the most cookbooky foodoir I've read. That's not a bad thing, I actually noted several recipes I want to try (her salad dressings and something called "Beauty Soup" sound delicious) and I don't often do that with foodoir recipes. I think bakers and more dedicated cooks will have a field day with what's included.

But this is very much equal parts food story and reckoning with family damage. She shares what she learns about herself and where she came from, all stemming from these travels and memories: "The family I got did not have to be my reference point for my place in the world, which was enormous and beautiful and full of great things that had absolutely nothing to do with them or with their silly fights."

I wasn't immediately drawn into the book, and I can't say how glad I am that something made me stick with it. I cried at Nunn's descriptions of her messy, estranged in many branches family, her own misunderstandings and slights among family and friends, and her observations of the difficulties of finding one's place in life especially alongside the specter of aging and regret (the chapter about her dad had me especially torn up.) They hit home so strongly. I'm not sure if these stories would have the same effect on someone not from a similar type of family, the kind that leads to a specific type of brokenness which Nunn excellently, heartbreakingly describes. This is so recommended for anyone from such a family. There's comfort in the acknowledgement that you're not alone.

An emotional if at times unevenly written memoir, cookbook, and glimpse into another's broken but mending life that provides a lot of insight about your own.

While I assumed from the start that I would love this book as food memoirs as my favorite types of books to read, I was completely blown away. This book took me through the wringer of emotions - I laughed, I cried, all while not yet knowing if I even liked the main character, Emily. Plus, there is the bonus of having recipes included. While I've yet to make anything from one of the included recipes, I've already recommended this book to friends and and family and will definitely be purchasing a tangible copy for my collection. Highly, HIGHLY recommend.

I found the opening chapters detailing the author's heartbreak and struggles with addiction compelling but found the subsequent chapters skipping around with different friends less compelling. It felt like a chore to pick up the book to get through another interaction with friends mixed with not terribly illuminating observations on the nature of comfort food. But I think the concept and enticing cover will draw in plenty of readers.