Book 1 Post 1

 Love, Loss, and What We Ate by Padma Lakshmi

When I first began reading this book, I was under the impression that Lakshmi was going to talk extensively about her marriage and her subsequent divorce. However, she gets to the main points very quickly in the first chapter. Even though she doesn't talk about it for too long, Lakshmi uses an assortment of adjectives and descriptive language to bring the story of how she met, married, and divorced her husband to life. Lakshmi carefully balances out her complaints with her reasons for being happy. I could clearly see how she had many misfortunes in her life, but the way she wrote made it so it didn't sound very irritable. Lakshmi begins many new ideas in her book by honing in on some related element that is part of the story that the reader is coming across. While this sometimes made me confused as to where the story was going, it made the transition very smooth and kept me from experiencing a feeling of choppiness.

The most detailed and extensive parts of her story focus on the food she ate, particularly their ingredients. Lakshmi mentions constantly the enormous assortment of spices she enjoys using, and all the ingredients she observed the women in her family using while growing up. One special word she uses is chaatpati. A food gains chaatpati status when it has a perfect balance of saltiness, tartness, sweetness, and spiciness. Along with these descriptions, she uses words like tang, tingle, gooey, and finger-sucking good to describe the foods she loves. Even though I am unfamiliar with most of the foods she mentions, I can get some sense of what she so fondly writes about because of the amount of sensory descriptions she loads her writing with. She also describes how she has always associated food with femininity and how she only learned about family cooking secrets as her body developed.

Aside from the bright association with femininity and food, Lakshmi talks about her struggle with endometriosis, a disorder in which tissue that lines the uterus grows outside it. She talks about how she spent every week each month in extreme crippling pain, the whole time assuming it was a natural part of being a woman. This caused her to cancel many meetings and not attend many special events throughout her life. It also played a huge part in her divorce, as the pain kept her from being physically intimate with her ex-husband. Lakshmi eventually got surgery and had the abnormal tissue removed, but she had to spend a few days hospitalized. Her story and her pain are something I cannot even come close to imagining. Through reading her story, I was able to get a look into what many women have to endure, for the most part silently.