Emily Nunn finds comfort in cooking, reconnecting with friends, family
If a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, how does a comfort food tour begin? With a single recipe? With a kind word? With a generous, loving offer of safe harbor?
Emily Nunn's journey of a thousand miles began with all of those things, leading her down a road reconnecting with friends and family she had thought lost to her, and into a kind of healing she needed more than anything in life, and which she thought would never come. Eventually, it led to "The Comfort Food Diaries: My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart," her singular, poignant and beautifully written memoir chronicling that search in vignettes so personal and at times so dark yet moving, that the words will rip your heart right out of you.
"When I started, I was so broken," Nunn said in an interview from her North Carolina home. "It's hard to explain how completely lost I was."
She wanted to cook with and be around people - people who maybe had difficult lives - "I wanted to see how they did it." How they coped.
Nunn is a journalist and food writer. A Southerner, born and raised in Virginia but living in North Carolina now, she writes freelance for such publications as
