From Scratch is for anyone who has ever loved, lost and then tried to find their way forward. It is for readers who like a story of self-discovery driven by adversity and for anyone who has ever had life ask more of them than they knew they were capable of.
While it is at once an epic romantic cross-cultural, cross-continental love story, it is also a story of the permanence of the families we create whether through adoption or biology or even through forgiveness. An international story, spanning two continents, two languages and multiple cultures, I hope the books speaks to the prismatic nature of identity and what it means to be an immigrant – a person of two lands. It is about the way travel makes the world intimate and the way life is capable of dishing delicious grace when and where you least expect it.
At the heart of the book are two themes: the island of Sicily in the dazzling Mediterranean and it’s incomparably simple, evocative and straightforward food.
Those themes coalesce to reveal the connective and healing power of food and it codifies memory by connecting us to our past, our present, even our futures. Everyone eats, everyone has a favorite cook in their lives. Everyone wants to keep the essence of someone they loved and lost close to them. From Scratch is a testament to the way the table is a place where love passes through us.
Someone recently described the book as Eat Pray Love meets The Year of Magical Thinking meets Under the Tuscan Sun. WOW! Those books all touched readers who wanted to be inspired and transported away from their own experience and those who wanted to explore the universal human experience of loss. The common thread in each of these books is a woman’s inspiring journey of losing herself in order to find herself and stand in her truth. In FROM SCRATCH, the woman just happens to be me.
In the end, I hope the book will inspire readers to reach for big love, take big risks.
Not just in big ways but in tiny daily gestures. It can be a big risk to quietly say “I’m sorry” or to forgive those closest to us, or to forgive ourselves. And I hope the book will remind us that the world is greater than the confines of any border or geography or culture. That opposites do attract and can conjoin their hearts to what matters most. That the expanse of our shared humanity is full of more wonder and surprise than fear. And, in the end, if FROM SCRATCH can shed light on what it means to grieve openly and in different ways, at different stages of life, perhaps more people will understand not only the grief of others, but their own grief. To quote Leonard Cohen, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
Love,
Tembi
