Cakewalk: A Memoir
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- ISBN13: 9780385342988
- Condition: New
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Product Description
From the leader of the internationally acclaimed Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath comes a amusing, touching memoir of a crummy—and crumby—childhood.
Growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, Kate Moses was surrounded by sugar: Twinkies in the basement freezer, honey on the fried chicken, Baby Ruth bars in her father’s sock drawer. But sweetness of the more indefinable variety was harder to come by. Her parents were disastrously mismatched, far too distant with their mutual misery to notice its effects on their kids.
A frustrated artist, Kate’s gorgeous, variable mother lived in a constant state of creative and marital urgent situation, enlisting Kate as her confidante—“We’re the girls, we have to stick together”—and instructing her three children to refer to her in public as their babysitter. Kate’s father was aloof, ambitious, and prone to blasts of withering abuse increasingly directed at the daughter who establish herself standing between her embattled parents. Kate looked for comfort in the imaginary worlds of books and establish 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 tale 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 stout, 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 “tasty.”
Filled with the plenty and joy that were so missing in Kate’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.
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If you find baking therapeutic then this is the most comforting book you will ever come across. I have tried many of the recipes in this book and they are magnificent! My favorite is the Pecan Flavor birthday cake!
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
After reading reviews in magazines and taking a peak at this book on Amazon…I somehow expected more. The book is an ok read, but if I had it to do over again I wouldn’t buy it. It’s a small slow and kind of sad. There aren’t many amusing antidotes in the book.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
This is a smart, perfectly written memoir, so richly evocative that the recipes, while tasty, are only, um, icing on the cake.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
//Cakewalk// is a memoir that reads like fiction. It starts with a voice that seems just too sweet and cute for its own excellent. “Mom, did you know the words `treat’ and `threat’ are separated by just one letter?” But this is before the seriousness kicks in, as this is the right tale of her parents’ terrible marriage.
Kate Moses uses this 368-page tough pulpit to pay tribute to her late mother, a woman caught in the stranglehold of her spouse’s “brutalizing domination.” Yes, Moses’ father is the heavy, the government lawyer who stirred the family tree from West Coast to east and then to Fairbanks (“the San Jose of Alaska”).
A lot of pain is covered up by the leader’s memories of food. It seems that Moses has a bright recollection of every meal, every snack she consumed as a child and as a teen-ager. This is a bit overdone, especially with a recipe included at the end of each chapter. But if you find comfort in food, there’s plenty of comfort here.
Northern Californians will tell to Moses’ memories of Palo Alto and San Francisco circa 1969. This is an entertaining read that ultimately overstays its welcome.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Kate Moses is a child of the 70s, with all its inherent consequences. Reading her memoir will strike a familiar chord for many who grew up in the era. Having survived some epically terrible parenting by learning to bake and write, Kate has agreed back the many kindnesses she encountered by sharing her best recipes. Reading her lyrical remembrances makes one realize that the flavors of your memories should be catalogued with the sweet rather than the bitter. This book is a real treat.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5