“All Things Edible, Random and Odd is the best book I’ve ever read about what it means to be a father’s daughter.”
–Sarah Einstein, author of MOT: A Memoir
AVAILABLE NOW FROM CLASH BOOKS
ISBN: 9781955904896
Through lyrical and intimate personal essays, All Things Edible, Random and Odd delivers a portrait not just of a father who died, but of a daughter who kept living.
Sheila Squillante’s heartfelt and humorous essays introduce us to a father—a 1980s businessman and early adopter of the term “foodie”—and a daughter’s complicated grief. It also moves beyond that grief, to embrace the intricacies and delights of how life grows from it.
Food remains central throughout the collection with essays that serve up a menu (and sometimes recipes!) of Hawaiian beach seaweed, turtle soup, and fermented Icelandic shark. Nostalgia clashes with reality, through stories connecting memories to taste.
With poetic prose, Squillante expresses the complexities of unresolved relationships, the importance of shared experiences, and how family and food make us who we are.
Includes book club discussion questions
Praise for ATE
Confessional and curious, heartfelt and heartrending, Sheila Squillante interrogates family, food, and femininity in essays as wide-ranging in form as they are generous. If Montaigne reincarnated as a Gen Xer in Doc Martens who knew how to make a mean Mock Turtle Soup, we’d have All Things Edible, Random and Odd.
–Daniel Nester, author, Harsh Realm: My 1990s
Is it possible to resolve the grief—as well as understand the love—of a father who dies too young? In this quietly explosive essay collection, Squillante does just that. At the tender heart of these essays is the role food plays in this relationship, since Squillante inherits her culinary love from her father. Can food be a balm for grief? Can it be the means for the narrator to keep her father “alive,” to better understand him? As in the best essay collections, this one is voracious as the narrator also explores romantic relationships, motherhood, marriage, family, and the role literature plays in her life. In exquisite detail and with lyrical language, Squillante turns her life into art, as only the very best creative nonfiction writers can.
— Sue William Silverman, author, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences
All Things Edible, Random and Odd is an intimate, redolent story of loss, love, and growing into one’s own imperfect heart. Sheila Squillante’s wonderful memoir offers ladles of aromatic broth from the complex soup of family, marriage, and childbearing. Plus recipes! An amazing book.
~ Dinty W. Moore, author of The Mindful Writer
Reading these essays is like seeing—really seeing—the places and moments where the ones we loved used to occupy, and—for Sheila Squillante—how these moments sends the mind spinning into beautiful foldable forms. Like these essays. Within these pages Squillante encapsulates what it is to live and love and lose. And yearn. Yearn for that phantom taste that forever lingers.
-Ira Sukrungruang, author of This Jade World
All Things Edible, Random and Odd is a marbled collection of beauties. Its essays give us recipes for meat ragu and mock turtle soup but also show us how to move through the pangs of adolescence, a variety of heartaches, marriage, motherhood and the dark truths of love. It is, in a word (I can’t help myself): delicious.
—Randon Billings Noble, author of Be With Me Always
All Things Edible, Random and Odd is the best book I’ve ever read about what it means to be a father’s daughter. The book embraces all of the complexities of having, and losing, a father who was more present in the experiences he gave his children–particularly the food he served them–than in conversation or engagement with them. It’s a book about mourning both what was lost and what never was. A master class in writing sentiment instead without sentimentality, Squillante’s wry voice and trenchant observations guide us on a journey of love, loss, and moving forward.
—Sarah Einstein, author of Mot: A Memoir
All Things Edible is a marvelous exploration of the power of food to transcend time and distance, the work of creating lasting connections between generations. Squillante’s kitchen is not just the source of sustenance, but also the cultural and emotional nourishment necessary to fortify a family of blood and choice.
– Karen Babine, author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer
This book thrills me, since I pretty much only care about love, grief, and food, and Squillante’s essays super deeply satisfied my craving for understanding more about all three.
—Elisa Albert, Author of Human Blues
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