Daria Lavelle: ‘There's just something about a character driven wholly by love that makes him indelible'
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Irish Times
4 days ago
- Irish Times
A good spread of food memoirs: from the sanitised to the ‘slutty'
Picky Author : Jimi Famurewa ISBN-13 : 978-1399739542 Publisher : Hodder & Stoughton Guideline Price : £20 The Jackfruit Chronicles Author : Shahnaz Ahsan ISBN-13 : 978-0008683795 Publisher : Harper North Guideline Price : £16.99 Moveable Feasts: Paris in Twenty Meals Author : Chris Newens ISBN-13 : 978-1805224204 Publisher : Profile Books Guideline Price : £18.99 Tart: Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef Author : Slutty Cheff ISBN-13 : 978-1526682697 Publisher : Bloomsbury Guideline Price : £16.99 Care and Feeding Author : Laurie Woolever ISBN-13 : 978-0063327603 Publisher : Ecco Guideline Price : £22 Strong Roots: A Ukrainian Family Story of War, Exile and Hope Author : Olia Hercules ISBN-13 : 978-1526662927 Publisher : Bloomsbury Circus Guideline Price : £20 Early on in Picky, his ode to growing up second-generation British Nigerian and 1990s junk food, restaurant critic Jimi Famurewa unmasks the illusion that is food memoir. 'Working as a food writer,' he writes, 'can have a warping effect on childhood memories ... The past becomes an editable document.' It's provocative but risks spoiling the show. There's masterful writing, as Famurewa rhapsodises about a Twix 'scraped down to a soggy, denuded girder of a shortbread', the 'wincing remnants' of Brannigans crisps. It's refreshing to read an account of a reasonably happy existence – especially when it's of a single-parent son. Picky is also a significant meditation about the 'cultural performance of immigrant life', crucial to understanding the machinations of code-switching that is instinctive to multinational children. He is wonderful at expressing the heightened sensations of childhood, such as the giddiness of travelling to the US as an unaccompanied minor, 'a continent-hopping Paddington Bear of the sky'. His paean to McDonald's enlightened this second-generation immigrant reader why the 'slender, elegant uniformity of McDonald's fries in a pillar-box-red sleeve' held not only me, but my parents, in its sway. Famurewa, whose previous book was the eloquent Settlers, about the British black African experience – is a thoughtful, thorough writer. However, in a memoir the author must be the star, and even though he studied drama at Royal Holloway, Famurewa is reluctant. Out of respect, he never really delves into the people he loves, particularly his mother. Perhaps it's his British reserve coupled with the modesty of a 'Nice Nigerian Boy' but in Famurewa's conscientious refusal to manipulate his story, he and his characters never really take flight. READ MORE Shahnaz Ahsan. Photograph: Tracey Aiston If Famurewa is diffident about showcasing his immigrant family, Shahnaz Ahsan has no qualms about bragging about hers. Her cookbook memoir, The Jackfruit Chronicles, starts with her grandfather Habib, who arrives in Manchester from what is now Bangladesh in 1953 and starts a family that thrives despite Enoch Powell, Thatcher-era racism and post-9/11 anti-Muslim sentiment. British-Bangladeshis such as Habib created what we know as the 'Indian curry house', where one pot of house gravy is tailored into different dishes with proteins, vegetables and spices. Jackfruit's 'Benglish' recipes offer an intriguing glimpse of early immigrant adaptation: cheese and Patak pickle pinwheels, crumpets swapped for the flatbread chitoi pitha. Unfortunately, Ahsan's style is prone to cliched platitudes that emphasise the wonderfulness of a clan for whom 'food is the love language which we share'. 'Thank you,' she writes, 'to Aneesa and all the other aunties who pass on their wisdom both in and out of the kitchen.' Ahsan grew up on Enid Blyton, and Winona Ryder's Little Women, and it shows in her relentlessly heartwarming prose. Her characters lack nuance; her jokes fall flat. There's a touch of preachiness to Ahsan, who as a teenager would hide 'lads' mags' such as Zoo (where Jimi Famuwera once worked) 'in the belief that if we could, somehow, limit the availability of this media, women would actually be regarded with a modicum of respect one day'. In some families there is a refrain: Someone should write about how marvellous we are. The Jackfruit Chronicles is exactly the kind of saga that your grandma would bless. Food writer Olia Hercules , from London, must stand by as the landscape and people of her idyllic Ukrainian childhood are demolished. Her parents' home, built 'to retire in, to grow weathered in, alongside the creased riverbank that stretches below' is occupied by the Russian military. However, as she realises in Strong Roots, the war opens up another past, one whose wounds had been covered over during more halcyon days. 'When I was growing up, I never questioned why we talked about certain things in half-whispers,' she writes. 'My grandparents' memories were 'mined' and had to be trodden on lightly for a long time.' The irony is that the tales that Hercules gathers – horrifying, hilarious – might have been discarded were it not for the current terror. She's not alone; hordes of Ukrainians, since the war began, have been scrambling to preserve their heritage. However, such stories come with a cost, as Hercules realises when she prods her grandmother Vera for what is ancient and unendurable. '(F)rom out of her stiff body came a stiff voice ... I understood that her stiffness was a barrier, a barrier against the past, perhaps to shield her from things that she might have never discussed before.' There are some overripe moments. (For example: 'A list of occasions when I see my ancestors' smiles' that includes 'my children's eyes'.) However, Hercules knows how to mix lushness with crisp, unyielding fact; what's more, instead of explaining her characters, she describes them. Her grandmother Vera excitedly gets ready for a 'foto sessiya' with a crinoline blouse and 'huge lacquered hair'. 'I need you to be natural, grandma!' Hercules shrieks, and makes her change. The people in Hercules's book have been maturing inside her for a lifetime, gathering richness. They can be stubborn, quick to anger and vain; she conveys the way they talk over each other, and how their punchlines falter. Hercules's people may be strong, but she has also rendered them so vividly so that they will endure. They are blood, breath and bone – shut your eyes and they resound with exuberant cacophony. Slutty Cheff Slutty Cheff , the anonymous author of Tart, is a few years shy of 30. As her name suggests, she's a horny workaholic in an esteemed London restaurant, and bangs many a dish, on and off the line. She's white, socially privileged and loves her parents; she's at the sweet spot in life when things are on the cusp. In short, you'd hate her if she weren't so winningly self-deprecating. Tart is not strict memoir. As Slutty told British Vogue, 'Stories are based on my stories, and stories of my chef friends,' which makes it all the more entertaining, an updated 18th-century picaresque where the rogue hero is a woman 'who will feed your desire, like a Tesco meal deal'. Plus, although Tart has plenty of fat-and-sugar stoked steam, its author knows that the cardinal rule for both culinary and erotic writing is to stay crisp and dry. She observes, 'The other reason why I don't want people to know about my lover is far more important than gender politics: the man I'm sleeping with has a topknot.' There are darker aspects of Tart, like panic attacks and a sleazy co-worker, and Slutty confesses, 'Whenever I lose the sense of who I am or what I do, or I spin into disassociation or fall into a sense of depression I feel scared and worry that I'll never be happy again. There are two things in my life that are a constant reminder that pleasure exists: food and sex.' Anthony Bourdain. Photograph: Alex Welsh/The New York Times The kitchen, touted by many as an artistic vocation, can also be a form of self-medication, its mania an addictive panacea for people too terrified to stop. Laurie Woolever is 22 when Care and Feeding begins. She has a lot in common with Slutty, except instead of present-day London, she lives in 1996 New York. A blond Ivy League graduate who can cook and write, she will become assistant to the two chefs synonymous with that era's culinary machismo – the not-yet #MeToo'ed, evangelist of Italian cuisine Mario Batali, and Kitchen Confidential author Anthony Bourdain. Much as in Tart, what unfolds is a heady rush of alcohol, food, dirty sex and high-calibre work, proving that whoever said drink and drugs were counterproductive was wrong. Except. Let's just say that we hope Slutty doesn't suffer like Woolever in 20 years. This raw, scalding book is about what happens when one's career is ascendant while one's personal life unravels. Some events are spectacularly badly timed; shortly after Woolever gets sober, her husband leaves her and Bourdain kills himself. Woolever is briskly inventive, like when she describes a lamb tongue's salad as 'intriguing because of the truffles and provocative because of the tongue'. She's deadpan about Ferran Adria, pink limousines and a writer who 'had a revolting Humbert Humbert-ish way with wine descriptors ... bottles were 'sexy babies' and 'flirtatious teens'. Still, an attraction of the book is the two outsized men with whom she was affiliated, and on this Woolever delivers, sometimes reconfiguring their signature swaggers in unexpected ways. About Batali (who concluded a written apology about his misconduct with a recipe for cinnamon rolls) she's gentle – he's an erudite, generous monster who's a surprisingly astute observer of her spiralling behaviour. Regarding Bourdain, whose kindness she paints in many lights, Woolever gives him a remarkable send-off. 'He had,' she states, 'made the colossally stupid, but somehow wholly plausible decision to die of a broken heart.' If only she wasn't so excruciatingly hard on herself. Woolever details every embarrassing incident in her life, and reprints her journal extracts and emails with every blemish – they're broken and sloppy, the sort of thing a vainer writer would want permanently erased. However, much of Care and Feeding makes you crave reckless behaviour, such as that 'woozy punch-in-the-face feeling' of a gin-and-tonic at a Sri Lanka bar. You can't forget the brilliant accomplishments – in kitchens and elsewhere – that were fuelled by the admittedly toxic adrenaline of that time. Compare Woolever and Slutty to the more virtuous recollections of Famurewa, Ahsan, and Hercules; consider that there won't be a Batali autobiography any time soon, and it seems that, at least for now, in the world of food memoir, it will still be the white girls who have the most fun. Chris Newens. Photograph: Sabine Dundure In Moveable Feasts , Chris Newens seeks, in each of Paris's arrondissements, a dish that encapsulates something of the city's soul. Methodical and charming, Newens starts his research the old-fashioned way, by talking to strangers, waylaying Sri Lankan plongeurs on a sleeper train and sniffy haute bourgeoises after church. In the world, Paris is the city most famously defined by its outsiders. As his title suggests, Newens's teenage hero was Ernest Hemingway, and he is caught between the schoolboy fancies that lured him there, and the mercurial, multinational Paris that keeps him. His city hovers between unconventional and stereotype, with diaspora dishes that are also predictably Parisian (bahn-mi in the 13th), croissants and Congolese-style malangwa fish. As a white English man with fluent French, Newens can navigate the homeless in the Bois des Vincennes and a 1993 Saint-Émilion with equanimity. More than Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, Newens recalls another culinary Paris chestnut, George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. Like Orwell, Newens is at his best when he is observing individuals where they work, like the employees at the smoothly functioning colossus of decent-priced dining, Bouillon République. Many memoirs touch on home, that mysterious place where you belong. A Paris expat like Newens, however, decides to settle in a place where he will forever be foreign. It's not a choice all Paris immigrants make. For the Sri Lankan waiter at La Fontaine de Mars or the Peruvian-American student at the Cordon Bleu, there's a yearning for geographical and emotional permanence, to become an indelible part of the city's history. It is our sincere, if somewhat naive, hope that they will.
Irish Times
29-06-2025
- Irish Times
From dark and witty to feather-light perfection: New poetry by Kimberly Campanello, Patrick Cotter, Karen Solie and Bernard O'Donoghue
The dark, witty prose poems that form the body of Kimberly Campanello's An Interesting Detail (Bloomsbury, £10.99) are preceded by the more formal I'd Love to Say I'd Been There. It hypnotically builds its musical repeating lines on ' ... the bells / of the churches ... heard / below the waters / of the bay' so convincingly that even the meta-statement 'this opening sequence sounds incredibly akin / to the ringing of cathedral bells' does not jar the imaginative sonic waves carrying us to the ending. There, Campanello reveals that, like the reader, she's just been reading about this too – this is a hymn to the imagination as much as history. Campanello's neat, surprising endings are a central feature of her highly original prose poems, often upending a seemingly heavyweight beginning. In Major Insights, Campanello begins with a chart showing 'an ancient king found buried with his dog, four horses, cattle and sheep'. The speaker gifted this chart from which 'Major insights will be garnered' but the recipient doesn't want Campanello looking under her sink. 'I said it's not clean down there in anyone's house. I had brought lunch. I said I was hunting paper towel.' Campanello's exact deflation is particularly potent in poems describing her growing disability. One could almost miss the pain if the endings didn't bite so hard, 'If you wish I can pour you a glass of wine, but it is better if I make larger movements, like opening the corked bottle in one go. That is if I am to appear less vulnerable and more impressive, which I assume you prefer me to be.' Campanello's preoccupation with the layers of history mirror a powerful awareness of the seachanges in her still-young body, remembering her activist days, 'All those years walking great distances across capital cities during strikes. My body sliding off me like melted butter' (Ghost Walk). READ MORE Patrick Cotter's fourth collection, Quality Control at the Miracle Factory (Dedalus, €12.50), features many of his signature anthropomorphic poems – ranging from Reverse Mermaid through the identity-bending For What This Row of Rabbit Heads in My Wardrobe to the wild commentary of A Horse Called Franzine Marc, who enters the National Gallery knowing 'enough about Duchamp and Beuys to be unembarrassed when / she dropped ... an ephemeral treasure, // fluffy and fragrant. An arts journalist' speculates 'if this was meant as guerrilla art/or critical commentary'. Sometimes the surreal reveals that it is the real world that is more fantastic. The touching prose poem Crow, My Friend lists the crow's 'airdropped' presents of 'crazed creativity' that act as metaphors for Cotter's collage style, 'the feathered fish-hook ... the platinum screw from an aristo's sit-in trainset, the brass clasp from a child's Chinese casket'. And it's funny, 'The cat could not compete with the gist of these gifts', yet the crow disappears, his last message melted away in the snow. Elegy is Cotter's heart ground. In The Mare I Meet the Week of Your Death, Cotter's description of the horse expresses all the beautiful horror of fresh grief, 'Her prehensile lips form a glove ... Now she turns an eye the size of an anemone's bright / corona to blaze on me, her low gruff whinnies // like flat stones skipping across the pond of my hearing'. In Self-portrait at Sixteen, Cotter manages to hold two ghosts in one, Cotter's 16-year-old self in 1979 connecting with the 16-year-old Sarah Paddington at her 1821 grave in St Fin Barre's Cathedral. 'Later, I lit a candle for her Purgatory-dwelling / Protestant heart, at Catholic St Augustine's'. Karen Solie's deeply philosophical Wellwater (Picador, £12.99) begins in the basement where 'one is closer to God ... closer to consequence, to creatures no one loves / but the specialists' (Basement Suite). This is one of many acute Solie snippets, jostling beside quotations from writers including Rilke, Denise Riley or simply Proverbs, 'to which I guiltily return, / sliding another out of its pack, / he who troubles his household with groundless anger / will inherit the chaos that some of us / truly seem to prefer.' Restless, angry elegies for our stricken planet skewer the global economic crisis. 'To be no longer working bodes differently / for those of us who will not walk, as in the promotional literature, / upon the equatorial beaches ... Money buys the knowledge it isn't everything' (Autumn Day). Our global collective helplessness is given form and shape, held tight in lines that fall on the ear almost like a guilty pleasure. Red Spring charts the rape of the land by agrochemicals in Solie's native Saskatchewan alongside Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics, 'The chemical // in the field respects the gene ... the farmer the authority / of Bayer ... who will not hesitate to make of you an example / if you insult its canola patent by growing your own seed. // Such wide confusion fills the countryside...' Towards the end Wellwater begins to climb – to the stars in Orion – but most beautifully in the final Canopy, its owlets 'peering / through their nursery window' at young Solie and her family, sitting 'on the graded dirt' below two cottonwoods who 'built their circular staircases / 80 feet high, around columns / of absolute nerve'. Miraculously the cottonwoods still survive 'in excess / of their average lifespan ... In spring / they champagne the air with cotton'. The owlets could be a stand-in for a young Solie as the set-up reminds us of Autumn Day's chilling Rilke quote, 'Whoever has no house now, will never have one'. Yet the peripatetic Solie is mostly like the cottonwoods, building her own erudite and magnificent treehouse with 'absolute nerve' from words alone. Solie writes of songs so simple you don't recognise at first how good they are – a description that fits the brief brimming poems of Bernard O'Donoghue's The Anchorage (Faber, £12.99). O'Donoghue's poems are feather-light, yet they mimic perfectly the indelible sting of our sharpest memories. [ Bernard O'Donoghue: from byres to spires Opens in new window ] The title poem's 'anchorage' is an 'iron staple / In the wall which the dog had been chained to'. The farmers of O'Donoghue's homeplace of Cullen form a 'cortège of horse floats' making their way to 'repair the loss. / But what good was that?'. When the poet closes his eyes, all he sees is 'the invisible / Last leaping of the dog'. Memory and imagination are a lethal mix here, the reader reimagining the death that haunts the poet. And O'Donoghue drives that point deeper in the pitch-perfect Lif is laene, urging us 'read the small print' and 'for God's sake to love' our lives that may have to be sent back 'if we are not ready for the high investment ... And you must not put / their pictures into albums till you're sure / you can bear the cost of items of such inestimable value.' Death, always present in O'Donoghue's poetry, stalks now like never before. People are as likely to be making hay in the afterlife (While the Sun Shines) as in his memories of Cullen, which are, of course, another afterlife – his own 'picture album'. His version of Chaucer's The Privee Theef, simple, direct and terrifying, recalls another terrific Middle English translation The Move from O'Donoghue's previous collection and this gift extends to Old Irish too. The Hide, an unbeatably fresh version of Túaim Inbir, leaps off the page. 'My dear heart, God in Heaven, / He is the thatcher who made the roof. / A house into which the rain can't pour, / a refuge where no spear-point's feared, / open and bright to a garden...' The Anchorage confirms Ireland's quietest living poet as one of its finest.
Irish Examiner
28-06-2025
- Irish Examiner
Beginner's pluck: Full-time writer and mother Daria Lavelle
From a creative family, literature has always played a large part in Daria's life. 'I was an imaginative child,' she says. 'I invented stories and games, and at 15, I started writing seriously.' She won some teenage writing awards for short stories, and had a play performed when she was at college. 'From the start my writing had a speculative element, of fantasy and magic.' Daria worked in advertising as a brand strategist for 10 years, but she didn't stop writing. I continuously wrote novels. An agent sent out two YA novels, but they died. She started writing Aftertaste in 2019. 'It was my thesis project,' she says. 'During the MFA they matched students with agents. Lucy Carson showed great passion about the novel.' It has sold to 15 territories, and the movie rights sold to Sony. Who is Daria Lavelle? Date/ place of birth: 1987/ Kyiv, Ukraine. 'I was 2 when we emigrated.' Education: Public school in New Jersey; Princeton University, creative writing and comparative literature; Sarah Lawrence College, New York, MFA in fine arts in writing with a speculative fiction focus. Home: New Jersey. Family: Husband James, twins aged 7, and an 18-month-old. A golden Doodle, Stanley. The day job: Full-time writer and mother. In another life: 'Writing is something in my soul. But I'd love to experience film or TV.' Favourite writers: Karen Russell; Erin Morgenstern; Kelly Link; Amy Bender; Anthony Bourdain; VE Schwab; Jennifer Egan. Second book: 'I'm working on it.' Top tip: 'You have to build a whole world, with tools to help the reader immerse themselves in the novel.' Website: Instagram: @ The debut Aftertaste Bloomsbury, €17.99 While dishwashing in a restaurant, Kostya mixes a cocktail and discovers his ability to summon spirits through the food he cooks. Rising through the culinary ranks, he starts to connect the living with the dead through his cooking. But it's a dangerous game, that threatens the stability of the afterlife — not to mention Kostya's love life — with the psychic, Maura. Full of ghosts, and delectable food, this novel explores life, death, love, and friendship, but mostly the effects of grief, and the difficulty of finding closure. The verdict: A gourmet delight. Highly original and hugely evocative, it definitely tugs at the heartstrings.
