Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

Long before Padma Lakshmi ever stepped onto a television set, she learned that how we eat is an extension of how we love, how we comfort, how we forge a sense of home—and how we taste the world as we navigate our way through it.
Shuttling between continents as a child, she lived a life of dislocation that would become habit as an adult, never quite at home in the world. And yet, through all her travels, her favorite food remained the simple rice she first ate sitting on the cool floor of her grandmother’s kitchen in South India.
Poignant and surprising, Love, Loss, and What We Ate is Lakshmi’s extraordinary account of her journey from that humble kitchen, ruled by ferocious and unforgettable women, to the judges’ table of Top Chef and beyond. It chronicles the fierce devotion of the remarkable people who shaped her along the way, from her headstrong mother who flouted conservative Indian convention to make a life in New York, to her Brahmin grandfather—a brilliant engineer with an irrepressible sweet tooth—to the man seemingly wrong for her in every way who proved to be her truest ally.
A memoir rich with sensual prose and punctuated with evocative recipes, it is alive with the scents, tastes, and textures of a life that spans complex geographies both internal and external.
Love, Loss, and What We Ate is an intimate and unexpected story of food and family—both the ones we are born to and the ones we create—and their enduring legacies.
Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi's third book Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (Amazon) came out a little over a month ago and the reviews are in. The reviews are, on a whole, positive, though some critics make note of a jumbled timeline and say Lakshmi's writing can be overly-detailed. A majority of Amazon reviewers gave the book high marks, as well, commending the author for her use of "vivid details of sight, sound, smells, touches, and tastes to transport you to her experiences in India." One reviewer, however, was less than impressed, writing that the author "made a not so subtle dig at one of the other regular judges as perhaps having a drinking problem." Unlike her previous two books (both cookbooks), Love, Loss, and What We Ate gets personal, often touching on the TV personality's relationship with her ex-husband, Salman Rushdie. (In 2012, Rushdie released his own memoir, which offered some biting critiques of Lakshmi's personality.) The majority of the book, though, details Lakshmi's life as a child in India, her immigration to the United States, and what she ate along the way, with recipes interspersed throughout. Below, the review roundup:

South China Morning Post:

Although uneven at times and with a strangely jumbled timeline, the narrative is a collection of heartfelt memories, astute observations and plain old good dish. In the book's acknowledgments, Lakshmi thanks Rushdie for "planting the seed" for the memoir and "handing her Rousseau". What she hands back to us readers may not be Rousseau, but it's a moveable feast - funny, poignant and delectable all at once.

Los Angeles Times:

A theme emerges in the pages of "Love, Loss, and What We Ate" of a beautiful woman determined to prove her other merits. She writes of the "imposter syndrome" she experienced alongside chefs like Eric Ripe on "Top Chef" and of the panic that often overcame her on posing for photographers on the red carpet with Rushdie: "I was captured being what I most feared I would become: an ornament or medal."

USA Today:

Food, inextricably woven into so many of Lakshmi's memories recipes are periodically inserted, for delicacies ranging from chapati chutney to "egg in a hole" is particularly central in these recollections. "Cooking was the domain not of girls, but of women," Lakshmi tells us; and the savoring of meals and snacks can be described as evocatively as the preparation.