FOOD AND WHINE

CONFESSIONS OF AN END OF THE MILLENNIUM MOM

by Jennifer Moses ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1999

She may be the one—the new Erma Bombeck that publishers are searching for—with this book that is sometimes laugh-out- loud funny, ironic, frank, fearful, neurotic, warm, and engaging. That’s a lot of responsibility to heap onto a relatively small memoir of a year from hell in the life of a nice Jewish girl who wanted to be a “way-cool artistic type living in a garret in Paris.” Instead, she found herself the wife of a lawyer and mother of three children, a son and a set of unmatched twins (a boy and a girl). She had followed him from New York to Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., and was facing yet another move to Baton Rouge, La., where Moses, a northern car alarm, would be tossed into a den of southern belles. Meanwhile, her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and her literary career was measured in rejection slips. She could have a nervous breakdown or write a book. The book is about food, because, as Moses says, “I spend the greater part of my waking hours feeding people,” but it is about food the way Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can is about soup. The recipes—no haute cuisine here—are delicious dishes that mothers with three knee-high children can put together with whatever in the refrigerator is “not speckled with mold.” In between and even among the recipes are conversations with her mother, lectures to her children, stories of her family, of her love for her children, her guilty feelings about her children, dreams, fantasies (no longer about Woody Allen hiring her to write a script but about Barney’s longed-for demise), and a hilarious description of a disastrous dinner party. Witty, moving stories from a Jewish mother of the ’90s—plus, the recipes work (if you’re not too picky about measurements).

Pub Date: May 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-684-84837-6

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION