Life Without a Recipe: A Memoir

On one side, there is Grace: prize-winning author Diana Abu-Jabers tough, independent sugar-fiend of a German grandmother, wielding a suitcase full of holiday cookies. On the other, Bud: a flamboyant, spice-obsessed Arab father, full of passionate argument. The two could not agree on anything: not about food, work, or especially about what Diana should do with her life. Grace warned her away from children. Bud wanted her married above alleven if he had to provide the ring. Caught between cultures and lavished with contradictory advice from both sides of her family, Diana spent years learning how to ignore others well-intentioned prescriptions.

Hilarious, gorgeously written, poignant, and wise, Life Without a Recipe is Dianas celebration of journeying without a map, of learning to ignore the script and improvise, of escaping family and making family on ones own terms. As Diana discovers, however, building confidence in ones own path sometimes takes a mistaken marriage or twoor in her case, three: to a longhaired boy-poet, to a dashing deconstructionist literary scholar, and finally to her steadfast, outdoors-loving Scott. It also takes a good deal of angst (was it possible to have a serious writing career and be a mother?) and, even when she knew what she wanted (the craziest thing, in ones late forties: a baby!), the nerve to pursue it.

Finally, fearlessly independent like the Grace shes named after, Diana and Scotts daughter Gracie will heal all the old battles with Bud and, like her writer-mom, learn to cook up a life without a recipe.