Grace Dent: Hungry; A memoir of wanting more.

I had high hopes of this book as it was recommended by a young writer friend of mine with impeccable judgement and the screen grab of a couple of pages he DM’s to me were very encouraging. However, having now read, I must confess to disappointment.

The big problem with the book was that it seemed to have too many different foci goin on at the same time - to use a food analogy, there was far too great a mixture of different ingredients with the result that the final product was not really quite sure what it was.

Initially reading about it, and when I started, I was expecting something like Nigel Slater’s Toast, where the focus on food was both directly autobiographical (and wonderfully evocative at that) and at the same time, was indirectly giving a broader and deeper picture of the life and experiences of the writer. I wonder if this was the initial inspiration but for me this end result did not work. I felt that we constantly hopped back and forwards between different aspects of the author’s life - their parent’s relationship, the role played by food and certain foods in particular, while growing up, how the author became a writer, their relationship with their parents etc. And while each of these was interesting and effective, they did not blend into a coherent whole - hence the feeling that the focus of the book was constantly changing. Given its title, and her role, food played less of a significant part in it than I expected.

However the latter sections, with the onset of her father’s dementia (and everyone’s unwillingness/reluctance to see it for what it was) at the same time as her Mother was battling cancer was very powerful and moving and the guilt caused by the distance between the writer and her parents - physical and social - was very powerfully and movingly explored. This latter part of the book was definitely the best and most involving. I also enjoyed the extreme contrast between what she ate when growing up (and returned to throughout her life) and the sort of crazily extreme haute cuisine that was her London life. The book also shows very vividly how one can become totally London-centric and assume that it really is the centre of the known and civilised universe. But the author is pretty sharply aware of this too.

At the end I did feel that she had (begun to?) come to terms with where she came from, he parents, and where she was now.