Everything Is Under Control: A Memoir with Recipes

A gorgeous, raw, and riveting memoir-in-pieces about food, family, and opportunities both taken and missed 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.