My Kitchen Wars: A Memoir (at Table) [Paperback]

Although My Kitchen Wars is a war story, this time the warrior is a woman and the battleground the kitchen. Her weaponsthe batterie de cuisine of grills and squeezers and knivesevoke a lifetimes need to make dinner, love, and war. By prying open the past with these implements, Betty Fussell gives voice to a generation of women whose stories were shaped and yet simultaneously silenced by an era of domestic strife and global conflict, from World War II to Vietnam.

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My Kitchen Wars also is a love story, recounting Fussells liberation from the tyrannical Puritanism of her family by a veteran of the Good War, a young writer named Paul Fussell. But she soon finds herself captive again, constrained by the roles of faculty wife and mother. Still, she cannot stop hungering for both a life of the mind and carnal pleasures. Her inner war to unite body and mind brings down the marriage in a denouement as brutal as the whack of a cleaver. Yet Fussell, however bruised, emerges to cook another dinner and to tell her tale in this fierce and funny memoir. My Kitchen Wars was adapted into a one-woman play performed in Hollywood and New York.