Licking The Spoon: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Identity

Freelance writer Walsh's memoir starts off with great promise. Her early family history includes both Cuban and Greek roots and foodstuffs as well as Irish alcoholic dysfunctionality. Passion for food and cooking, a constant during the author's broken childhood and adolescence, persisted despite several geographical relocations. Her initial steps toward selfhood included foreign travel and college along with romance sex and drugs. By the time the narrator moves to New York, the narrative devolves into a chronicle of various relationships, harder drugs, various jobs and therapy. Walsh meets a man whom she later marries and who fathers her two children, and after a final, post 9/11 move to New Mexico, they divorce and the narrator remarries, this time a woman. Long-buried family secrets and eating disorders are part of overwrought memoir laced with vivid scenes and finished with. (Nov.)