Bethanne Patrick

Recommended Reading: "Trail of Crumbs"
February 6, 2008

I've written before about my love of "memoirs, with recipes" -- and I've been waiting for months to share this latest one with you. Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love and the Search for Home by Kim Sunée  was one of the most popular Book Expo galley grabs last year and it's one of the first of my BEA stack that I read last summer. This is a complicated, achingly honest, and completely original book. It will grab you by the heart (I don't use that dramatic phrase lightly), but may disappoint you in the end.

That's life.

And that's why I think that you should read Trail of Crumbs, even though it's Sunée's first book and she doesn't quite manage to wrap it all up in a perfectingly resolved package. She's young and has experienced such deep loss, pain, and loneliness that I'd be more shocked and less interested in her story if she had managed to top it all with a lovely bow. You could argue that she should have waited to write it, or that there was a different way to edit the book. It's still powerful.

Sunée, now a magazine editor, opens the book with scenes of her at first seemingly idyllic life in Provence as the well-set-up girlfriend of Olivier, the founder of the L'Occitane toiletries empire. As chatelaine and de facto stepmother to a young daughter, Sunée seems to exist in a golden haze of privilege and social life, from time to time whipping up exquisite yet uncontrived meals for large numbers of sophisticated guests.

                                                      

But her story began so very differently. When she was three years old in her native Korea, Sunée's mother sat her down on a park bench with a handful of food and told her she'd be right back.

Three days later policemen found the frightened toddler, clutching a fistful of crumbs.

The "trail of crumbs" the author tries to follow (she and her sister were adopted by a New Orleans couple) back to her mother, her origins, and what she hopes will be a font of love and acceptance instead lead her to an inward journey and some radical decisions about her life. Along the way, she cooks -- oh, how she cooks! I haven't seen a writer/cook fuel recipes with this kind of passion and desperation since M.F.K. Fisher. 

Perhaps one day Sunée, who is now the food editor at Cottage Living magazine, will also write as well as M.F.K. Fisher. That's not a criticism -- it's a hope.

Posted by Bethanne Patrick on February 6, 2008 | Comments (1)