Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story

In a bland look back at her middle American childhood maneuvering between her parents’ joint custody, L.A. journalist and blogger Morris found comfort and control in learning how to simplify elaborate recipes for her own use. The daughter of two doctors in Meadville, Pa.—her father was one of two ob-gyns in town, her mother one of two pediatricians—Morris was five years old when her father had a child by his “mistress.” The divorce and split of households that followed meant that she grew up largely feeling unloved in her father’s new household in Saegertown. By high school, however, she had moved to her mother and stepfather’s place in Pittsburgh, where she was copiously fed and religiously went to church; in Pittsburgh she met her future husband, Matt. She attended Johns Hopkins University and eventually moved with Matt to Hollywood to hustle jobs in film and TV writing. Much of Morris’s chronological memoir relays the young couple’s valiant attempts to pursue their creative endeavors while forced to find temp jobs. Morris earned an M.F.A., planned a wedding despite some opposition in her family to a Jewish husband, and started a blog exploring how recipes from food magazines turn out in the hands of ordinary cooks like her which was “messy, poorly lit, and falling well short of our aspiration.” Unfortunately, Morris’s lackluster prose never elevates the story. (Feb.)