Eat, Memory

Eat, Memory is a slim collection of essays that originally appeared in The New York Times Magazine. ”The food doesn’t matter, really,” writes editor Amanda Hesser. ”What it evokes does.” And what food evokes here are recollections of loss and sadness. Bel Canto author Ann Patchett describes a lunch in Paris about which she remembers precisely nothing, ? because she and her future husband argued and almost split up. Novelist Dorothy Allison wonders why she craved her mother’s gravy, but her own son won’t touch hers. And in the book’s most affecting piece, writer Allen Shawn recounts his annual lunch with his autistic sister — and what happened the year he served prosciutto. These are rich, idiosyncratic stories you can relish even if you couldn’t care less which spices Allison’s mama put in the gravy. B+