Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen

by Matt Mcallester and Matthew McAllester

Book Overview

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist discovers a portal to the past and a bridge to the future in this tribute to a mother who poured her love into everything she cooked and gave her children, in their... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385342187
• ISBN13: 9780385342186
• Release Date: April 2009
• Publisher: Dial Press
• Length: 210 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.8" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

More than you expect

That "Bittersweet" would be a moving memoir is no surprise. It's written by one of our generation's most compelling chroniclers of humanity in conflict, who now turns his skills toward his fraught relationship with his mother, a woman burdened with demons, stifled ambitions and insanities. It's easy to lump it in with other "cooking" memoirs ("Julie and Julia" has already been referenced here) or reflections on motherhood but it's much more. This book ranges from lighter questions about modern day detachment (topical enough to be the subject of "Up in the Air" in cinemas) and health care indifference to deeper issues like neglect, guilt and love. The themes are carefully unveiled in a plot arc with an emotional twist at the ending. (Disclosure: I'm a friend of the author's but not an automatic cheerleader for his work).

Highly Recommended

This is one of the most moving books I've read in a long time. Haunting even. It is a memoir with recipes but so much more. It's one man's journey through grief and memory to come to a greater understanding of his mother. It has humor, tragedy and great insight and is fantastically well-written. Parts of it are profoundly sad, but it is by no means "depressing" or "detached." If anything its ultimate end is the opposite.

A page-turner

Matthew McAllester's memoir is a beautifully written book about coming to terms with the death of his mother while he makes the difficult journey towards being a parent himself. A highly acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, Matthew writes sparely but tenderly about a very sad and difficult subject - his mother's mental health issues and alcoholism which exploded into his life at an early age. He recounts her, and happier times in his childhood, through her recipe books which he has inherited, and memories of her love for food and cooking. In lesser hands this sort of memoir might have been overly-sentimental and clumsy, but Matthew's talents make it a great read. Just like all the food he learns to cook, eat and love, I gobbled down this book in a couple of days!

A touching memoir - couldn't put it down!

I was very moved by this book. After Matt McAllester's mother dies, he uses her cookbooks to reconnect with the warm, loving woman of his childhood, before she was consumed by mental illness. As he is doing so, he reflects on his own struggles to conceive a child with his new wife. It's an honestly written, multi-layered story that had me turning the pages. The writing was beautiful and sparse. I particularly liked the scenes of the author's childhood in Scotland. It was also interesting to read about how his mother's recipes were influenced by French and British cookbooks which I had never heard of. I loved his descriptions of learning to make delectable meals, filled with love, sadness, anger and forgiveness. Definitely a good book for a foodie and a wonderful book about love and loss.

elegant prose, beautiful and tragic

A moving and fascinating book by a gifted journalist, who focuses his investigative talents this time on his own childhood. Years covering the world's most complicated conflict zones apparently gave McAlester great practice at untangling individual tragedy and spinning it into elegant and lucid prose. He does the same thing with his own life-story, reliving painful memories of anger and love for his mentally-ill mother. Though it's unique, McAlester makes the memoir universal somehow by relating it all through the comfort foods his mother made for him during her best times. It was a pleasure to read despite the sadness. David Lawrence Albion, Maine