The Kitchen Congregation: A Daughter's Story of Wives and Women Friends - Hardcover

At the risk of sounding sexist, it's impossible to imagine a man writing this book. 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: "The human spirit required complications, she said, places to go and not go, ascent and descent, stone walls and smooth paths to organize itself. She explained all this while peeling carrots." 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. --Wendy Smith

Nora Seton grew up in Massachusetts and studied art history and classics at Harvard. She then worked as a farmer and in the grain and cattle industries. She is 37 and married with two children.