From the author of the internationally acclaimed Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath comes a funny, touching memoir of a crummyâ€”and crumbyâ€”childhood.Growing up in the

Cakewalk: A Memoir

From the author of the internationally acclaimed Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath comes a funny, touching memoir of a crummyâ€”and crumbyâ€”childhood.

Growing up in the 1960s and â€™70s, Kate Moses was surrounded by sugar: Twinkies in the basement freezer, honey on the fried chicken, Baby Ruth bars in her fatherâ€™s sock drawer. But sweetness of the more intangible variety was harder to come by. Her parents were disastrously mismatched, far too preoccupied with their mutual misery to notice its effects on their kids.

A frustrated artist, Kateâ€™s beautiful, capricious mother lived in a constant state of creative and marital emergency, enlisting Kate as her confidanteâ€”â€œWeâ€™re the girls, we have to stick togetherâ€â€”and instructing her three children to refer to her in public as their babysitter. Kateâ€™s father was aloof, ambitious, and prone to blasts of withering abuse increasingly directed at the daughter who found herself standing between her embattled parents. Kate looked for comfort in the imaginary worlds of books and found refuge in the kitchen, where she taught herself to bake and entered the one realm where she was able to wield control.

Telling her own story with the same lyricism, compassion, and eye for lush detail she brings to her fiction, coupled with the candor and humor she is known for in her personal essays, Kate Moses leavens each tale of her coming-of-age in Cakewalk with a recipe from her lifetime of confectionary obsession. There is the mysteriously erotic German Chocolate Cake implicated in a birds-and-bees speech when Kate was seven, the gingerbread people her mother baked for Christmas the year Kate officially realized she was fat, the chocolate chip cookies Kate used to curry favor during a hilariously gruesome adolescence, and the brownies she baked for her idol, the legendary M.F.K. Fisher, who pronounced them â€œdelicious.â€

Filled with the abundance and joy that were so lacking in Kateâ€™s youth, Cakewalk is a wise, loving tribute to life in all its sweetness as well as its bitterness and, ultimately, a recipe for forgiveness.
Country USA
Brand The Dial Press
Manufacturer The Dial Press
Binding Hardcover
ReleaseDate 2010-05-11
UnitCount 1
EANs 9780385342988

Country	USA
Brand	The Dial Press
Manufacturer	The Dial Press
Binding	Hardcover
ReleaseDate	2010-05-11
UnitCount	1
EANs	9780385342988

Cakewalk: A Memoir

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