The Kitchen Congregation: A Memoir by Nora Seton

Description

Nora Seton’s warm, savory memoir is unmistakably female in its blend of forthright physical details, painstaking analysis of intricate personal relations, and intellectual musings.

In this, the author mirrors her beloved mother, novelist Cynthia Propper Seton. Writing with downright elegance that always delivers the unexpected phrase or insight, Seton explores the kitchen’s meaning for women as the center of the home–the place where friends gather to drink coffee and share secrets, where children stand on overturned salad bowls to reach knives, where the evening news is absorbed while drinking wine and chopping onions.

Seton’s memories of her mother’s slow death from cancer and the stillbirth of her own first child are poignant but never depressing because she conveys such a palpable sense of life as a process, of experiences that may wound or rejoice but always enrich the soul.