Reviews
'A war correspondent by trade—past assignments include Iraq, Afghanistan and Jerusalem—McAllester has produced in "Bittersweet" a scrupulously honest dispatch that's every bit as gripping as a report from Abu Ghraib, and every bit as vital...Yes, the book is about Ann McAllester, who succumbed to madness and alcoholism when Matt was 10 and had only just found a bit of stability when she died suddenly at 62. And yes, it's about food, which McAllester prepares according to her recipes in an effort to reconnect with the mother she'd been before she lost her mind. But above all, "Bittersweet" is a mosaic of the disorienting facts of life after death—the prayers we con ourselves with, the old sorrows we uncover—assembled with an utterly unsentimental eye. "My mother's careful rectangles of tape kept the [cookbook] hanging together," McAllester writes. "Drops of something brown—early versions of sauce for spareribs?—spattered pages 336 and 337, the latter of which featured the recipe we used to love. I had forgotten about spareribs." This is the memoir of grief as journalism, no sugar added.' - Andrew Romano, Newsweek.
Full review here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/195112
It takes little to satisfy a child, certainly less than the idyllic moments recalled by Matt McAllester, a Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent, in his new memoir, Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen. Love and food are the simple ingredients and the young McAllester had plenty of both.
He spent vacations at his parents' log house on an almost deserted Scottish peninsula. When his mother's scones were ready, she grabbed a brass bell, stepped out of the house and let ring. The sound travelled across the peat bogs and the heather and Matty and his sister would come running.
"We spoon honey and jam onto the warm drop scones and eat dozens, until we can eat no more," he writes.
This recipe for childhood bliss, from the perspective of a 10-year-old, went bad overnight. Alcoholism and mental illness made McAllester's beautiful, loving mother unrecognizable, even repugnant. As soon as he could, he fled her sight.
I met him years later when he was still on the run. We were both correspondents based in Jerusalem (he worked for Newsday), covering the second Palestinian Intifada against Israeli occupation, and conflicts beyond.
Our most poignant moments involved stories about the victims of conflict. The image of a woman in a black chador on the outskirts of Baghdad, holding an emaciated child gasping his last breath as we watched, is one of many that will be with us forever. In Ramallah we were pinned down by heavy crossfire for what seemed like hours. On the road to Nablus, we had rifles pointed at our heads. Inevitably, we became good friends.
Young and brash, McAllester had something of the invincible about him. It helped him cross snowbound mountains to enter Kosovo at the height of that war – reporting that led to an earlier book, Beyond the Mountains of the Damned – and to survive imprisonment and interrogation by Saddam Hussein's henchmen in Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison. He captured that experience in another book, Blinded by the Sunlight.
His fearlessness at times was unsettling. But you could count on him putting equal resolve into finding a good meal. It's a common desire among foreign correspondents. But only McAllester would use his reporting skills to track the owner of his favourite chicken shack near Bethlehem – closed due to Israeli shelling – and beg him to venture from his home to strike up the grill. Another thing set him apart: He could cook.
The force behind these passions was McAllester's mother, Ann Taylor, the tragic heroine of his memoir. Her descent into madness ends in 2005 in the old folks home in London were she lived. She was in her early 60s.
McAllester, 35 at the time, compares the unexpected impact of her death to a swinging sack knocking someone off a horse in a Robin Hood film, leaving him breathless and "staring at the insects and the pinecones on the forest floor."
He imagines a way to "put back together what had long ago been lost and broken" when he discovers a pile of his mother's handwritten recipes. He decides to master those and others from chefs his mother admired. His quest to recreate the smells and tastes of his childhood is heightened by anxious attempts to have his first child, in vitro, with his wife.
He shares his adventure with five recipes sprinkled through the first half of the book. More would have been better, not only because McAllester is an excellent cook (I speak from experience), but because the book loses some of its ironic balance when they disappear.
The absurd is never far from death. McAllester hears it in what would have been his mother's banal last words to her adolescent children if her suicide attempt had succeeded: "I'm going out for a bit." Years later, at the news of her death, he gets a sudden urge to buy the stuffed bust of a wildebeest in an antique shop. At her funeral, his eulogy is dotted with wilful inaccuracies and embellishments, part of the ritualistic attempt to somehow make a person's life and death make sense.
Painfully evocative...laced with humor...a haunting tribute.
Last weekend, I returned from a vacation in Thailand, where my reading included a touching new memoir, “Bittersweet -- Lessons From My Mother’s Kitchen” by Matt McAllester (Dial Press). The author’s mother suffered mental illness, leading to years of estrangement from her son. She died in 2005.
McAllester’s mother was a keen amateur cook and he decided to try to reconnect with her memory by creating meals from recipes she used by Elizabeth David and other chefs. Grief hits you in funny ways. My mother died in 2001, and I found myself in tears in a Bangkok restaurant while reading the book.
One amusing anecdote concerns McAllester’s father, Don, a photographer who took the cover shot of a cake for the Rolling Stones’ album, “Let It Bleed.” The band showed up for the photo shoot with an entourage and he found the only “vaguely normal person” around was Keith Richards, which makes you wonder about everyone else. The cake, incidentally, was baked by Delia Smith, who went on to TV fame.
In this eloquent tribute, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist McAllester (Blinded by the Sunlight: Surviving Abu Ghraib and Saddam's Iraq) takes a break from global conflict to address a much more intimate struggle, his late mother’s descent into mental illness. After learning of her death, McAllester pores through his mother's old collection of cookbooks in an attempt to reconnect with the loving woman he remembers. Using the wise work of British celebrity chef Elizabeth David, his mother’s true north in all things culinary, McAllester masters cassoulet, lobster, elaborate omelets, and steak with bordelaise sauce, gaining not only in confidence and ability but in understanding and acceptance. The process involves McAllester's touching descriptions of his mother’s dishes and the memories they elicit: strawberry ice cream, homemade bread and a stolen taste of fresh parsley all provoke fond stories of his mother in her prime. As he tries to makes sense of his mother’s declining years, visiting past residences and even requesting her medical files, McAllester loses some of his enthusiasm for cooking, but brings his mother's complicated, troubled soul into focus. With this memoir, McAllester makes a fine, food-centric testament to the redemptive power of grief and acceptance. May 11, 2009
McAllester...is one of the leading war correspondents of his generation...What is uncommon is McAllester’s response to his mother’s death in 2005. He didn’t look for more war in which to bury his grief. Instead, he turned to food, trawling Ann’s recipe books for tastes and sensations that would recreate the warmth and love he had felt from her before she went crazy. This quest is the subject of his powerful memoir...Forgiveness is the lesson of this harrowing, deeply honest book.
So many contemporary memoirs of family life are either horror stories or maudlin riffs on love acknowledged too late. Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Matt McAllester's "Bittersweet: Lessons From My Mother's Kitchen," refreshingly, instead tries to understand why for so many years he was estranged from the mother who had once "deluged" him with love.
A former war correspondent, McAllester first recalls growing up in a house "full of mingling, delicious smells" -- and how on what was to be his last visit to his mother in London, she gave him a new zester.
That was a reminder that she had once been a superb cook especially devoted to Elizabeth David, the doyenne of British cooking.
When his mother died unexpectedly from a heart attack in 2005, McAllester thought he had accepted her readiness to die -- "I've been married; I've had my children; I'm ready to die," she had recently remarked. But he suddenly realized that it "was absolutely not fine for my mother to be dead."
His grief, he admits, was surprisingly intense for a man accustomed to death.
He had reported, after all, on wars in Lebanon and Bosnia, and later Afghanistan and Iraq, but now for months he found himself repeating the same two sentences: "Where are you? Please come back."
Though he was 35 and had long given up on his often drunken and mentally disturbed mother, he now realized that "half of the protective field" he had relied on to keep him safe and make sense of the world had gone forever.
It was a tough adjustment, complicated by his wife's unsuccessful attempts to become pregnant and his reluctance to cover more wars.
In short chapters, McAllester movingly evokes first the happier times: his mother's vitality, her interest in cooking and her ability to radiate love. And he decides that perhaps if he began cooking from her recipe books he might, not being a believer, find her. When this fails, he acquires her medical records, so that he can find out why she began drinking, attempted suicide, and, mentally ill, was lost to him for so many years.
McAllester brings a reporter's sensibility to his story. And he is determined to find answers, which he does, though not ones he expects. But that doesn't matter because this a remarkably loving and wise account of a mother whose "loveliness -- her illness and her death" finally taught him about life.
It's Mother's Day and I can't think of a more fitting tribute than Bittersweet:Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen. Lots of "memoirs with food" are about discovery and love and various happy episodes in life, but Bittersweet is not that kind of memoir. A seasoned war correspondent and Pulitzer prize-winning author, Matt McAllester begins his tale with the death of his mother, a woman who struggled for years with mental illness and alcoholism. He is someone who knows how to write about pain, but this is another kind of pain altogether. It is personal.
Just as food is a way to explore pleasure, it is also a way to explore grief and healing. McAllester tries to find the mother he has lost and that the world lost to madness, through her recipes and his recollection of meals she prepared for him in happier times. His writing is masterful and deeply confessional. The recipes, and the sense of discovery and understanding that come from this journey are bittersweet indeed, but beautiful, at times funny, and always very moving.
Although Bittersweet is not a happy-go-lucky kind of story, it is absolutely compelling. Tastes of British, Italian and French cooking, and the wisdom and influence of Elizabeth David are woven into the story of his mother and his road back from grief. There are recipes for scones from Scotland, an improvised cassoulet and an almost mythical strawberry ice cream. Even without the recipes, Bittersweet would be haunting and lovely. The book made me care deeply about the author and the sad story of someone brilliant who slipped through the cracks and most of all, it reminded me that food is sometimes the thing that gets us through the most difficult times as well as the happiest ones.
Bittersweet was an absolute joy to read. The writing is gorgeous. I didn't want the book to end. Even though it was sad, at times, it was also powerful. There are recipes interspersed and you just salivate with his descriptions of what he prepares. Family photos appear here and there. McAllester has crafted a winner. Highly recommended.
Really well written, the book has more than a little bitter mixed in with the sweet. You can expect to shed a tear or two.
Mother’s Day has come and gone, but most of us (mothers or children) are always interested in books on that enduring subject. Let me recommend two sons’ wonderful non-fiction contributions. Steve Luxenberg of The Washington Post has written ANNIE’S GHOSTS, a compassionate investigation into the life of his mother’s sister and why his beloved mother never revealed her sister's existence.....In a very different book, BITTERSWEET : Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen, Matt McAllester, also a journalist, reaches out after the death of his mentally ill mother, Ann, to reclaim her memory. Matt wishes to recollect her as a dynamic young woman and bring his own life in focus after burning out as a war correspondent. One way he finds is cooking from her cookbooks and remembering their lives together.
Bittersweet is an odd combination of Matt’s memories of his youth, his war stories, and his tender marriage to Pernilla. All of this is woven together with some of the recipes from his mother’s cookbooks and his own experiences in cooking them. The cooking angle works well to shield the reader from the harsh reality of his mother’s emotional deterioration. Her illness and the family’s struggle to maintain equilibrium are the most salient memories that Matt carries of his mother. “In trying to bring her back to me, I had never really intended to revisit my mother’s darkest years. They turned out to be inescapable and unavoidable.” This lovely book represents an effort to bring his life together.
In Bittersweet, Matt McAllester, one of the most gifted writers of his generation, has crafted a love story of the first order. His unflinching honesty will make you cry. His culinary adventures will lead you to put on an apron. And his graceful storytelling will transfix you. It is the most sumptuous of literary treats.
A book by one of our finest war-reporters, whose beat this time is not the battlefield but the kitchen. The precision of his descriptions, his frankness, and his defiant irony - for this is also a very funny book - gives us a powerful portrait of a family's courage, tragedy and love.
He brings you to tears in some portions of the book and makes you chuckle in others...As sad as it is, it has a grip on your mind and is a "I can't put it down" book.
He may have garnered a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of grim and gritty wars in the Middle East [please note - I didn't. My small share in a Pulitzer was for coverage of the crash of TWA FLight 800 off the coast of Long Island], but McAllester’s emotional life still focuses on his late mother. Her debilitating mental illness left her nearly incapable of unconditional love for Matt and his sister, but her unflinching devotion to Elizabeth David’s cookery principles cut through the horror and left her son a remarkable bequest to enlighten his life. The family started out in London, but they soon decamped for the primitive Scottish Atlantic coast. As he recounts his mother’s life, McAllester interleaves her story with that of his own marriage and the couple’s attempts to have children via in vitro fertilization. McAllester’s own deeply conflicted religious attitudes surface often, but his day-to-day practical psychological anchor is the sustenance that comes from cooking as his mother did. The book’s many sensitive photographs are a legacy of McAllester’s father, a professional photographer.
For the mom who likes a good book she can cry about, we have "Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen" by well-known war reporter Matt McAllester. This is a memoir that details how the author copes with the death of his mentally ill mother by looking into her favorite cookbooks and remembering the good times he had with her as a child...a tear-jerker and the perfect gift. - Phillyburbs.com, May 6 2009