In 1993 Ishmael Beah, age 12, sets off from his village in Sierra Leone with his brother and friends to another town, a day’s walk, to perform in a talent show. Along the way she falls in love with words, a love she uses to craft her fascinating, compelling, tragic, and ultimately transcendent, story. Though her circumstances are very specific-Cancer and disfigurement-they also feel utterly relatable as we follow her journey after she is diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer at age nine, has a third of her jaw removed, and begins a painful circuitous trek towards healing and self-acceptance. I read this memoir in my MFA program and felt swallowed whole by the intensity of Grealy’s story, and by her writing style, which invites her readers into her most intimate thoughts. My hope is that Crave gives my readers this same experience of shared challenge, a reminder of our own resiliency, and hope.
I find such comfort in reading books like these, they remind me that I am not alone. Navigating the threshold between childhood and adulthood is a dangerous endeavor, even in the best of times. The narrators in each of these coming-of age-memoirs share their experience of hardship but also of triumph as they ultimately overcome the challenges in their lives. For me, books were a doorway into other worlds, places that took me far away from my real life. While I couldn’t escape the challenges my turbulent family life posed while growing up, I did find relief as I lost myself in my favorite books. Fortunately, after much anguish and searching, I was able to find balance in my life: balance in my relationship with food and balance in how I look back at my experiences. Later, after I become an adult, the long-term results of that deprivation led to a crisis that threatened everything I loved most. It’s also about the constant hunger my three younger brothers and I endured while being forced to adhere to my mother’s regime of blended salads-and little else-three times a day for our formative years, and about the sense of deprivation that resulted. My book, Crave, a Memoir of Food and Longing is about the rigid, blended vegetable, cleansing diet, called the Program, which my mother instigated in our household after her two hospitalized breakdowns and a year in bed. I grew up in New York City, living in our exclusive Dakota Building apartment with my rageaholic, volatile, movie-producer father and my controlling, brittle, depressed, beauty-queen, Illinois farm-raised, mother.
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