The Award Tally
FictionNonfiction
Back to the full ranking
Tastes Like War: A Memoir cover

Tastes Like War: A Memoir

Grace M. Cho

0

awards won

4

score

Tastes Like War: A Memoir

Tastes Like War won the 2022 Asian/Pacific American Award in Literature, was a TIME and NPR Best Book of the Year in 2021, and was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Grace M. Cho grew up as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War, where identity was politicized by everyday details—language, cultural references, memories, and food. When Grace was fifteen, her dynamic mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue and evolve for the rest of her life. Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a daughter's search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother's schizophrenia. In her mother's final years, Grace learned to cook dishes from her parent's childhood in order to invite the past into the present, and to hold space for her mother's multiple voices at the table. And through careful listening over these shared meals, Grace discovered not only the things that broke the brilliant, complicated woman who raised her—but also the things that kept her alive.

Buy this book at AmazonAd
Publisher
Feminist Press at CUNY
Year
2021
ISBN-13
9781952177958
Genre
Biography & Memoir
Topics
Immigrant experienceMental illness and schizophreniaFood and cultural identity

Awards

If you liked Tastes Like War: A Memoir, you could also like these

Similar Topics