Published in 2020
256 pages
Phyllis Grant is an IACP finalist for Personal Essays/Memoir Writing and a three-time Saveur Blog Awards finalist for her blog, Dash and Bella. She has cooked in world-renowned restaurants, including Nobu, Michael’s, and Bouley. Her essays and recipes have been published in a dozen anthologies and cookbooks, including Best Food Writing in both 2015and 2016. Her writing has been featured in O, The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times, Saveur, The Huffington Post,Time, San Francisco Chronicle, Food52, and Salon. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband and two children.
What is this book about?
“What a beautiful, rich, and poetic memoir this is. Phyllis Grant writes of longing, suffering, celebration, family, and food with such delicate power. Like the best chefs, she knows how to make a masterpiece from a few simple ingredients: truth, taste, poignancy, and love. This is a wonderful book.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of City of Girls, Big Magic, and Eat, Pray, Love
Phyllis Grant’s Everything Is Under Control is a memoir about appetite–as it comes, goes, and refocuses its object of desire. With sparse, affecting prose, and an unsparing eye toward her, and her environment’s, darkest corners, Grant’s story follows the sometimes smooth, sometimes jagged, always revealing contours of her life: from her days as a dancer struggling to find her place at Juilliard, to her experiences in and out of four-star kitchens in New York City, to falling in love with her future husband and leaving the city after 9/11 for California where her children are born. All the while, a sense of longing roils in each stage as she moves through the headspace of a young woman longing to be sustained by a city, to a mother now sustaining a family herself.
Written with the raw transparency of a diarist, Everything Is Under Control is an unputdownable series of vignettes followed by tried-and-true recipes from Grant’s table–a heartrending yet unsentimental portrait of the highs and lows of young adulthood, motherhood, and a life in the kitchen.
