The Audacious Book Club: Bite by Bite by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Our June selection
In the opening essay for World of Wonders, her 2020 essay collection, Aimee Nezhukumatathil writes of childhood memories of the catalpa tree, which covered the grounds of Larned State Hospital where her mother worked. Nezhukumatathil and her sister would ride the bus there every afternoon and meet their mother when she was finished for the day. The trees, she writes, “watched over us as we made our way to our Mom’s office.” Amidst the intimate chronicle of the tree’s characteristics and the sphinx moths it attracts are the intimate details of a Filipino mother’s work life in the tree’s shadow. Nezhukumatathil reconstructs her mother’s days before moving on to detail her own work life beneath the canopy of the catalpa tree at the University of Mississippi. By its conclusion, the catalpa tree has become both a source of protection and a locus of memory, bringing together the natural world with the human: “The foot-long leaves of catalpa trees.like this one, for me, always meant shade from persistent sun and shelter from unblinking eyes,” she writes.
The intimacy and introspection Nezhukumatathil brings to the study of nature and humanity in World of Wonders are the same characteristics she brings to the study of people and food in Bite by Bite, her new collection. In this book, she examines forty foods and their associations with family, memory, and the way our palate both shapes and reflects the human experience. She writes of missing her parents and sending them pawpaws in the mail, of eating lychees by the bagful in western New York before she was married, of sharing a perfect risotto with her husband in Lugano.
Each of the essays in Bite by Bite is constructed using anecdotes, memories, historical tidbits, and beautifully-rendered drawings by Fumi Nakamura—the same artist who illustrated World of Wonder. This collection feels as much like a lovingly-rendered memoir scrapbook as it does a meditation on food, how it links us to one another, and how it makes us who we are. And that, writes Nezhukumatathil, is indeed the point: “what we think about food is a portal into our own personal histories, ourselves - and most lovely of all, it’s a chance to deepen our connections with others.”
Bite by Bite is a beautiful, meditative book, one that allows us to examine family and legacy through an original lens as well as encouraging us to question what we know about the foods we love. I look forward to discussing Bite by Bite with all of you on June 25.
So happy this was selected! My friend just gifted this book to me.
Il halfway through after finding it quite by accident. She packs so much into each section — memory, observation, taste —that I think, I’ll take a break, but can’t.