Feed the Hungry: A Memoir, with Recipes

By Nani Power

An author whose fiction has been praised by Mary Gaitskill ("Passionate, intelligent, and piercingly beautiful...an altogether striking debut") and Darcy Steinke ("Nani Power...shows that sensuality pervades all of life and is too powerful to be contained in the bedroom alone"), Nani Power turns her incredible storytelling talents to memoir, crafting a sublime work of nonfiction centered around a life of travel, eclectic dining, and dealing with her decidedly eccentric Southern bohemian family.

Consumption is the real American pastime. Through the prism of food, we all see our pasts differently. Like the finest food writers, Power brings readers directly into her world through the evocative depiction of the experience of eating. From her childhood on a rambling farm in Virginia -- during which she witnessed a saga of fighting, disowning, silencing, and other regrettable acts -- to her peripatetic and international adult life, Power's reflections are surprising, enthralling, and entertaining. She has a deep understanding of the cuisines of Peru and Mexico, Iran and India; her stints as a sandwich seller in Rio, a waitress in the East Village, a funeral caterer in the Deep South, and on a food junket to Japan all seem familiar as she relates each experience to us through its cuisine. A wealth of detailed recipes throughout the book offer a chance to recreate Power's memories in perpetuity.

Lyrical and uplifting, unflinching and brave, Feed the Hungry is a supple, evocative memoir of food, travel, Americana, and family history, written with all the creativity, tenderness, grit, and verve we have come to expect from this uncommonly gifted writer.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1416556060
• ISBN13: 9781416556060
• Release Date: June 2008
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A lifetime of food and family fun!

Any book that offers up good ways to cook raccoon deserves a place in my library. Its sort of like "Running with Scissors," but much less gruesome; food-oriented, its more like "Running with Spatula." The book has a fast, easy to read rhythm - a gallop through childhood memories that few of us could replay in such detail. Nani is a literary movie camera bringing us wacky home-footage of hippie parents, kooky uncles, and grandparents with lots of money. After three novels, a memoir helps us connect the dots on the true facts of Nani's life: where she lived, the jobs she held - even the trauma around her son's birth. What does a person go through? Now I understand. Back in the day, Nani and I were classmates and then she went on to become our creative writing instructor. Now I understand how she could remain so calm when problems occurred in our class: like the time we reviewed one guy's short story, took a break, then he didn't come back (leaving his pile of stories on the table). Social worker that I am, I called him up and encouraged him to return. He called Nani and did return, but the class was fairly strange. After reading about her life, it all makes sense: perhaps Nani is a craziness-magnet (which of course, is money in the bank for any writer)! Keep us fed Nani. And bring in as much home-footage as you're willing to share with the rest of us!