IT’S HERE!

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Love doesn’t always appear in a form you recognize. My friends and lovers are family too; sometimes the meals they cook nourish me more than even Baba’s endless feasts. I am this family’s self-appointed bearer of memory, recalling the absent spaces, recording the recipes, searching for the glimmer of devotion, the aroma of happiness, the back beat of bitterness. Between recipes and stories, I will ask myself a thousand times: who owns these memories? How is it that each of us remembers in a different way?

from Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl

It arrived in the mail, express-mail to be exact. I was all alone. I was nervous. I opened up the envelope, took a deep breath. There it was, red and juicy and new. It had that fresh, papery, inky, new-book smell.

My fourth book.

I was all alone. I picked up my book. It looked strange and luscious at the same time. I opened it. Did I really write this? The pages were crisp and clean. After all those months – years, really, of scrolling through the text on a computer, or of typed dog-eared manuscript pages, lines crossed out, typos corrected in the editor’s red pen – this felt bizarre. The weight of it, in my hands; the angularity. The finite, material reality of it. There’s no changing, denying, or witholding it. It belongs to the world now. My fourth book.

So now it’s yours, too: to read, reinterpret, use, talk about, quote, critique, review, lend, borrow, buy, laugh with, cry over, disagree with, be comforted by….

Available in Canadian bookstores now!

In Toronto, you can find it in excellent indie bookstores like This Ain’t the Rosedale Library, Another Story, Pages, Toronto Women’s Bookstore (it’s in the big ones too, but you know who your friends are!). Vancouverites will find it at Little Sister’s Bookstore and Barbara Jo’s Books to Cooks for certain, but I’m sure People’s Co-op Bookstore, Duthies and others will have it too. In Edmonton, go to Audrey’s on Jasper Ave., or that lovely one on Whyte Ave.

Bookstores in the U.S. should have it in a week or too. And, you can order it online, from anywhere in the world, at amazon.com.

Or,come to one of my launches and buy a copy there! I’ll sign it for you! I’ll chat with you!

I can’t wait to see you there!


COMFORT FOOD FOR BREAKUPS WESTERN CANADIAN TOUR:

Toronto: April 19, 7-9 pm, Mitizi’s Sister, 1554 Queen St W.
Edmonton: May 15, Audrey’s Books, 10702 Jasper Avenue
Vancouver: May 24, Barbara Jo’s Books to Cooks, 1740 West 2nd
Courtenay BC: Sometime end of May/early June, TBA

Photo by Laurie Bell

3 Comments

  1. Congratulations — it’s a beautiful book — a tribute to your love of food, and your love for your family and friends too.

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