C(h)ristine's review
Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant by Jenni Ferrari-Adler (Goodreads author!)
A collection of 26 essays (and at least one short story–Murakami’s wonderful “The Year of Spaghetti”) about cooking and/or dining solo. I found myself getting incredibly lonely reading these stories one after another. Plus it did get repetitive–it’s remarkable how many common threads there are to dining alone. All these writers, men, women, living in different geological areas, from different cultures, overcame the same feelings, the same resistance, and felt the same unsteady victory of dining alone. And the scenarios? Also similar: post-breakup, post-college, living in a studio apartment, a spouse that constantly worked late thereby leaving the writer to fend for him/herself, etc., etc. In some ways, they were the same story over and over again. Some other essays seemed in a rush to hand off a representative recipe of dining alone. So I decided to read it in sections instead. That was quite nice.
