I'm no food connoisseur, but I love to eat and I also enjoy reading about food, so chef Erin French's new memoir Finding Freedom is technically right up my alley. French fell in love with food while working the line at her dad's diner as a teenager and later on, as a young adult, maintained a close connection with food through her subsequent gigs as a waitress, bartender, caterer, and sales clerk at a kitchen supply shop. Unlike most chefs, French never received any type of formal training – she never went to culinary school and much of what she knows about cooking was self-taught through trial and error in the kitchen (and she has the scars on her arms to prove it) – yet through hard work and perseverance, she was able to turn her passion for food and natural ingredients (from growing up on her parent's farm) into a successful career. French is the owner of The Lost Kitchen -- a small restaurant tucked into a repurposed 19th century mill in the little town of Freedom, Maine (population less than 1000). In the open kitchen of her award-winning restaurant (which is also world-renown), French cooks to a constantly packed crowd, with bookings for the 40-seat dining room usually sold out months in advance. French's restaurant specializes in "farm-to-table" cooking where she plans her menus daily around the freshest ingredients she is able to obtain each day – majority of her nearly all-female staff are farmers who tend to their own farms by day and work at the restaurant by night, oftentimes bringing with them to their shifts the ingredients that would be used in the day's dishes (i.e. ripe tomatoes newly picked that morning, eggs laid that day by farm-raised chickens, etc.).
Behind French's success though, is a harrowing personal story of survival – a journey fraught with pain and turmoil, and enough emotional ups-and-downs to last her several lifetimes. In her memoir, French writes candidly, honestly, and succinctly about her various struggles -- from growing up in a dysfunctional household with an emotionally absent father, an obedient-to-a-fault mother, and an estranged younger sister who loathed her, to getting pregnant at 21, dropping out of college, and subsequently becoming a jobless single mother who eventually moves back in with her parents, then later marrying a man 20 years her senior who turned out to be a scumbag, manipulative monster. She also lays bare her struggles with depression, suicide, self-loathing, an addiction to prescription drugs that spiraled out of control, and the moment she hit rock bottom after being committed to a psychiatric ward and subsequently forced into rehab, losing everything – her home, her restaurant, her marriage, and most painful of all, her beloved child – in the process. Broken, beaten, penniless, with all sense of dignity and self-worth shattered beyond repair, it takes all of French's strength – physically, mentally, emotionally – to claw her way back from the precipice and rebuild her life from scratch.
French's story is poignant and heartbreaking, yet also hopeful and inspiring. There were moments that made me cry, moments that made me smile, and of course, moments that made me seethe with anger. French writes with raw honesty and sincerity about her life that is rare and absolutely admirable. She does not shy away from recounting her own flaws, nor does she deny her own role in making a mess of her life (for example – deliberately ignoring all the red flags and warning signs about her ex-husband Tom and the kind of person he was), which I definitely appreciated. Prior to reading this book, I actually had never heard of The Lost Kitchen, but afterward, I found myself wanting to learn more about this little restaurant "in the middle of nowhere" and the tenacious woman who overcame the odds and poured her heart and soul into creating it.
This is a memoir that I'm glad I read and that I absolutely recommend. Unlike some other food memoirs I've read, I like the fact that this one achieves a good balance between recounting the details of the author's story and describing the various food-related elements such as the dishes that the author cooked and how she sourced her ingredients, etc. There have been times when I would read a food memoir and the descriptions of the food would consist of various fancy words that usually went way over my head -- French's memoir is different in that it's very down-to-earth and the food descriptions are ones I am able to relate to. This book actually doesn't come out until April, but if you love food memoirs like I do, I would recommend picking this one up sooner rather than later!
Received paper ARC from Celadon as part of Early Reader program.
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