Eat Joy: Stories & Comfort Food from 31 Celebrated Writers

By Anthony Doerr

Named a Best Cookbook of the Year by Martha Stewart Living

"Magnificent illustrations add spirit to recipes and heartfelt narratives. Plan to buy two copies—one for you and one for your best foodie friend." —Taste of Home

This collection of intimate, illustrated essays by some of America’s most well–regarded literary writers explores how comfort food can help us cope with dark times—be it the loss of a parent, the loneliness of a move, or the pain of heartache.

Lev Grossman explains how he survived on “sweet, sour, spicy, salty, unabashedly gluey” General Tso’s tofu after his divorce. Carmen Maria Machado describes her growing pains as she learned to feed and care for herself during her twenties. Claire Messud tries to understand how her mother gave up dreams of being a lawyer to make “a dressed salad of tiny shrimp and avocado, followed by prune–stuffed pork tenderloin.” What makes each tale so moving is not only the deeply personal revelations from celebrated writers, but also the compassion and healing behind the story: the taste of hope.

"If you've ever felt a deep, emotional connection to a recipe or been comforted by food during a dark time, you'll fall in love with these stories."—Martha Stewart Living

“Eat Joy is the most lovely food essay book . . . This is the perfect gift." —Joy Wilson (Joy the Baker)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781936787746

Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelAll the Light We Cannot See. He is also the author of two story collections, Memory Wall and The Shell Collector; the novel About Grace; and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. He has won five O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.

Reviews for Eat Joy

[ecataldi-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Every story and accompanying recipe was a breath of fresh air and touched not only my heart, but my stomach. Every writer had a way with words and wrote a biographical story that centered on food that had an impact on some aspect of their lives. At the end of the story the recipe is included. The recipes range from complicated to simple - something for every occasion. Broken into four parts: growing pains, loss, healing, and homecoming - famous, well respected, and award winning authors share stories that will stick with readers. A great gift for any foodie in your life. I plan on storing this with my cookbooks and trying out some of the recipes - a fantastic collection!

[sanyamakadi · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It makes me sad to say it, particularly given how lovely the illustrations are, but I found this book to be disappointing. For starters, it is misnamed. I have read many books about the joyful connections people make with food, and they are usually amazing, euphoric tales that talk about family and magical experiences, transporting the reader into the experience. However the stories in this book were not so much about joy, as about grief. The subtitle of the book is "Stories and Comfort Food," and most of the stories were using food as a source of comfort. Which is fine. But expecting joy and getting sadness is quite the letdown. A better title would have been, "Eat Comfort." Secondly, the end of the book notes that seven of the 31 stories had been previously published elsewhere, and those include writings by some of the best known authors. That left me feeling a bit cheated....why buy this book if the stories I want to read can be found elsewhere? And finally, we all know that comfort food is often simple and childlike, but foodies may find the recipes more disappointing than clever...the book included three different recipes for variations on plain white rice, one for boxed macaroni and cheese with hot dogs, and one that suggested mixing water with boxed brownie mix, then eating raw with one's fingers.