A Memoir with Recipes

by Phyllis Grant
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2020

One of Esquire’s Best Cookbooks of 2020 and one of The Washington Post’s Best Food Books of 2020

‘In epigrammatic, nearly poetic diction, Grant… reminds us of how transformative the junctures where food and life collide can be’
The New York Times Book Review

‘What a beautiful, rich, and poetic memoir this is… Like the best chefs, Phyllis Grant knows how to make a masterpiece from a few simple ingredients: truth, taste, poignancy, and love.’ Elizabeth Gilbert, author of City of Girls and Eat, Pray, Love .

Phyllis Grant’s Everything Is Under Control is a memoir about appetite as it comes, goes, and refocuses its object of desire. Grant’s story follows the sometimes smooth, sometimes jagged, always revealing contours of her life: from her days as a dancer struggling to find her place at Julliard, to her experiences in and out of four-star kitchens in New York City, to falling in love with her future husband and leaving the city after 9/11 for California, where her children are born. All the while, a sense of longing pulses in each stage as she moves through the headspace of a young woman longing to be sustained by a city into that of a mother now sustaining a family herself.

Written with the transparency of a diarist, Everything Is Under Control is an unputdownable series of vignettes followed by tried-and-true recipes from Grant’s table-a heartrending yet unsentimental portrait of the highs and lows of young adulthood, motherhood, and a life in the kitchen.