- Title: Everything Is Under Control: A Memoir with Recipes
- Author: Phyllis Grant
- Pages: 238
- Publisher (Publication Date): Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 21, 2020)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0008338973
- Download File Format: EPUB
“In epigrammatic, nearly poetic diction, Grant . . . reminds us of how transformative the junctures where food and life collide can be.” –The New York Times Book Review
“What a beautiful, rich, and poetic memoir this is . . . Like the best chefs, Phyllis Grant knows how to make a masterpiece from a few simple ingredients: truth, taste, poignancy, and love.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of City of Girls and Eat, Pray, Love
Phyllis Grant’s Everything Is Under Control is a memoir about appetite as it comes, goes, and refocuses its object of desire. Grant’s story follows the sometimes smooth, sometimes jagged, always revealing contours of her life: from her days as a dancer struggling to find her place at Julliard, to her experiences in and out of four-star kitchens in New York City, to falling in love with her future husband and leaving the city after 9/11 for California, where her children are born. All the while, a sense of longing pulses in each stage as she moves through the headspace of a young woman longing to be sustained by a city into that of a mother now sustaining a family herself.
Written with the transparency of a diarist, Everything Is Under Control is an unputdownable series of vignettes followed by tried-and-true recipes from Grant’s table—a heartrending yet unsentimental portrait of the highs and lows of young adulthood, motherhood, and a life in the kitchen.