A Recipe against Loneliness: Writing about Life and Food as Consolation in Irish Recipistolary Memoirs and Novels

Description

“Art is communication,” advises writing teacher and poet Natalie Goldberg, and by expressing ourselves to other human beings, we may reach across the chasm of loneliness and find comfort and solace. Writing about one’s life may be a form of consolation, of helping us to make sense of our existence. Writing about food can be the way into such existential reflections – food is always solid, stubbornly material even on the page, vivid, colourful and engaging the senses. But food is also relationships, traditions, history, and a multi-layered conduit from the self to the world – as well as to the reader, especially when framed as a recipe. In this paper, I will investigate how three Irish “recipistolary” memoirs or autobiographical novels, Maura Laverty’s Never No More (1942), Marsha Mehran’s Pomegranate Soup (2005) and Sophie White’s Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown (2016), use writing about life and about food as forms of consolation. Recipistolary texts, following Doris Witt, incorporate recipes with the narrative. Mehran’s tale of three Iranian sisters in Mayo echoes her own life in exile; White’s memoir and cookbook tells a story of breakdown and recovery; while Laverty wrote a fictionalised version of her own childhood after a period of quasi-exile as a governess in Spain in the 1920s and 30s. This paper shows that both cooking and writing signified comfort and communion for these writers.

Period	22 May 2025
Event title	Conference of the Association of Franco-Irish Studies: Consolation(s)
Event type	Conference
Location	Caen, FranceShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International