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Biography & Autobiography. Cooking & Food. Health & Fitness. Nonfiction. HTML: A vivid memoir of food and family, survival and triumph, Love, Loss, and What We Ate traces the arc of Padma Lakshmi's unlikely path from an immigrant childhood to a complicated life in front of the cameraâ??a tantalizing blend of Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone and Nora Ephron's Heartburn Long before Padma Lakshmi ever stepped onto a television set, she learned that how we eat is an extension of how we love, how we comfort, how we forge a sense of homeâ??and how we taste the world as we navigate our way through it. Shuttling between continents as a child, she lived a life of dislocation that would become habit as an adult, never quite at home in the world. And yet, through all her travels, her favorite food remained the simple rice she first ate sitting on the cool floor of her grandmother's kitchen in South India. Poignant and surprising, Love, Loss, and What We Ate is Lakshmi's extraordinary account of her journey from that humble kitchen, ruled by ferocious and unforgettable women, to the judges' table of Top Chef and beyond. It chronicles the fierce devotion of the remarkable people who shaped her along the way, from her headstrong mother who flouted conservative Indian convention to make a life in New York, to her Brahmin grandfatherâ??a brilliant engineer with an irrepressible sweet toothâ??to the man seemingly wrong for her in every way who proved to be her truest ally. A memoir rich with sensual prose and punctuated with evocative recipes, it is alive with the scents, tastes, and textures of a life that spans complex geographies both internal and external. Love, Loss, and What We Ate is an intimate and unexpected story of food and familyâ??both the ones we are born to and the ones we createâ??and their endur… (more)
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When I first picked up this book I didn’t even remember that was her. It was almost a pleasant surprise to find a book about a woman that paved her own way and some recipes to try out. Only recently have I learned of the scandals she got herself into, i.e. entering relationships with much older men, custody battles, etc. but that I still didn’t have an opinion about her until after I read the book.
Lakshmi tells her life story connecting everything back to her love of food. She was a model yet that wasn’t what garnered her lots of attention it was her cookbook. Being a model helped sell the book but that was what got her into writing. Her biggest gig had to do with food and in a way it still is. She’s honest with her experiences and doesn’t shy away from sharing details that, in my opinion, make her look bad. I don’t think we would make good friends but she seems like the kind of person that would make going to a fancy lunch kind of fun.
I don’t read a lot of celebrity memoirs, but when a friend recommended this one I had to see what the fuss was about. I’ve never seen Top Chef but I know of its existence. And I’d heard of Lakshmi, though I was completely unaware of her personal drama.
I liked the portions of the book that took us back to her childhood in India, to the cultures, foods, sights, sounds and smells that helped form her. I was much less interested in her marriage, divorce, new relationship(s), and pregnancy. From what she relates of her early adulthood (into her 40s), I got the impression that she identified herself by the man she was attached to. This irritated me and I didn’t really like her all that much as a result.
However, I still found her story compelling, and I kept listening and came to appreciate the woman she is today more than I did at the beginning.
Lakshmi narrates the audiobook version herself. I cannot imaging anyone doing a better job of it. The CD has a bonus PDF file with all the recipes that are included in the book.