Editorial Content for Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
One thing you can almost guarantee about Padma Lakshmi is that years, even decades, from now, she will be celebrated for making an indelible and positive imprint on how we appreciate multi-directional lives, especially as lived by determined women.
The March 8, 2016 release --- on International Women’s Day, no less --- of her substantial and edgy memoir, LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT WE ATE, stands out amid the ebb and flow of today’s global celebrity-consciousness as the work of someone seriously dedicated to multiple achievements.
Just as the many spices and ingredients in the foods of her Indian childhood, or the internationally inspired recipes gleaned from her high-profile career as one of TV’s “Top Chef” judges, blend with memorable sensory impact, so do Lakshmi’s parallel lives as an actress, supermodel, writer, chef, women’s health advocate, fashion designer, business entrepreneur and mother. Every thread of the fabric she describes so vividly in LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT WE ATE continually intersects and diverges like the ever-changing dynamics of her own extended family. In both practical and profoundly spiritual ways, they are all related, cherished and interdependent.
"What sets LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT WE ATE apart as such a deeply personal yet publicly generous account is its mindful honesty, verging at times on vulnerability."
Encouraged from an early age to use her athletic mind to its fullest, educated in theater and the arts, a published author long before her stunning looks propelled her to fame as India’s first international modeling sensation, Lakshmi capably embraces the challenges of writing a complex and fascinating mid-life story.
No slave to chronological shopping lists or predictable sequences of important public events, Lakshmi takes a thoughtful and sometimes meandering route through life as real people live it. Her reflections and reminiscences range from dealing with a controversial marriage to, and divorce from, bestselling author Salman Rushdie; balancing the demands and conflicts of living in two cultures; enduring decades of prolonged pain from undiagnosed endometriosis (for which she became a powerful health education advocate); overcoming color bias and physical perfection barriers in professional modeling; and establishing her own credentials as a serious artist and writer.
The outcome has not been a rising sequence of successes, but instead the very believable predictability of overwhelming simultaneous stresses, alternating with periods of leisure and abundant creativity. Everyone can relate to that!
What sets LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT WE ATE apart as such a deeply personal yet publicly generous account is its mindful honesty, verging at times on vulnerability. Whether scandalizing female relatives by omitting “essential” yet untasted ingredients from traditional recipes, or taking the huge (and ultimately painful) risk of disclosing the father of her cherished daughter, Krishna (born in 2010), Lakshmi never shies away from firmly owning and accounting for her decisions, even those made against the advice of people much respected and admired.
The bottom line is that life is meant to be lived in all its fullness, with responsibility and love, but not excuses. Perhaps that’s why there are no tantalizing photographs inserted among the 325 pages of LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT WE ATE. Apart from a single image on the dust jacket, there’s nothing to distract the reader from turning page after page in deep absorption and engagement with the sheer detail and sensory color of Lakshmi’s masterful prose.
Oh wait, there are the recipes --- dropped in here and there just when the flavor of her words and memories needs them to make the “picture” complete.
This is a true gem of a memoir for reading, tasting, sharing and learning.
Teaser
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 home --- 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. 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.
Promo
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 home --- 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. 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.
About the Book
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 camera --- 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 home --- 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 grandfather --- a brilliant engineer with an irrepressible sweet tooth --- 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 family --- both the ones we are born to and the ones we create --- and their enduring legacies.
Audiobook available, narrated by Padma Lakshmi
