How can a god-fearing Catholic, immigrant mother and her godless, bohemian daughter possibly find common ground? Food Was Her Country is the story of a mother, her queer daughter and their tempestuous culinary relationship. From accounts of 1970s macrobiotic potlucks to a dangerous mother-daughter road trip in search of lunch, this book is funny, dark and tender in turn. Bociurkiws Ukraine-born mother is a devotee of the Food Channel and a consummate cook. When she gets cancer of the larynx, she must learn how to eat and speak all over again. Her daughter learns how to feed her mother, but, more crucially, how to let her mother feed her. Food Was Her Country explores a daughters journey of grieving and reconciliation, uncovering the truth of her relationship with her mother only after her death. Marusya Bociurkiws Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl was a food writing phenomenon: the worlds first LGBTQ food memoir. With this long-awaited follow-up, Food Was Her Country draws upon a queer archive of art and activism, stories from her popular food blog, Recipes for Trouble, as well as social histories of food, evoking new beginnings and fresh ways of tasting the world.
Marusya Bociurkiw received her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of British Columbia. She has published articles, essays, and reviews in academic, arts, and activist journals and books in Canada and the United States for the past twenty years. She is the author of four literary books, and her films and videos have screened at film festivals, art house cinemas, and universities around the world. She is currently an assistant professor of media theory and head of the Media Studies stream in the School of Radio and Television Arts at Ryerson University in Toronto.
An absorbing reminiscence thats sad and consistently regretful and yet a delight to read Bociurkiws companion volume to Comfort Food for Breakups, her 2007 memoir, meditates on and interweaves family, migration, rejection, history, and loss. Brett Grubisic, The Toronto Star
An un-put-down-able memoir! Daughter Marusya and mother Vera carry food while traversing spaces large as continents between themto find love, grief and love again. Cynthia Flood, author of What Can You Do
Emblematic of a specific Canadian generation: a child of immigrants finds feminism and lesbian life pulling her far from her familys expectations and demands. Yet, in this moving memoir, Marusya Bociurkiw reveals how both mother and daughter fought for a relationship on new terms, where both could retain their autonomy without controlling the others life. The authors discoveries are illuminating for the reader, and articulate possibilities of understanding with individuation, rarely imagined or realized. Sarah Schulman, author of Conflict Is Not Abuse.
Its a joy to witness Bociurkiws funny, self-deprecating, deeply loving elegy for her mother, Vera. Her mother is her muse, and the memoir runs chronologically from her mothers early homophobic distance to her fond old age. Bociurkiws crisp, buttery phrases are as delicious as the dishes that she inherits. Elisha Lim, author of 100 Crushes
Sharp, tender and affecting, these stories of food and familyand politics and secrets and silence and speech and forgiveness and loveaccrue into a powerful whole that left me sad, yearning and satisfied all at once. Anne Fleming, author of poemw.
Food Was Her Country is a tenderly crafted story about complex relationships and histories. In it, lives come together across the dinner table, where mealsand moreare shared. Mya Alexice, Foreword Reviews
