Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Memoirs

STIR

Jessica Fechtor

A Broken Brain, a Tiny Kitchen, and the Meals that Brought Me Home

During a break at an academic conference, Jessica Fechtor was running happily on a treadmill—until, in an instant, she wasn’t: A True Story of Food, Family, and Recovery from a Ruptured Brain Aneurysm.

Jessica Fechtor was on top of the world: a Harvard graduate student, happily married, and thinking about starting a family. Then, while attending an academic conference, she went for a run and an aneurysm burst in her brain. Multiple surgeries left her skull startlingly deformed. She lost her sense of smell, the sight in her left eye, and her confidence about who she was and what mattered. Jessica’s journey to recovery began in the kitchen as she was strong enough to stand at the stovetop and stir. There, she learned about the restorative powers of kneading, salting, and sifting, that food had something to tell her, and that it felt good to listen.

STIR tells the story of how Jessica set about cooking and baking to pull herself back together again, fixing what was broken, and living with what couldn’t be fixed. STIR is about relationships and love, and the power of food in all our lives.

Jessica Fechtor writes the popular food blog Sweet Amandine. She is a PhD candidate at Harvard University, where she has received numerous awards for her research and teaching. She lives with her husband and daughter in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Available products
Book Published 2015-06-23 by Hudson Street Press
Book Published 2015-06-23 by Hudson Street Press

Comments

Jessica Fechtor writes with remarkable lucidity, courage, and grace about the darkest and brightest moments a person can know. Stir will feed you, even after the last page is turned.

Stir is a beautiful, sometimes sad, often heart-lifting story of putting back together what has fallen apart. It is a poignant reminder of how inexorably tied our hearts and minds are to our stomachs, and what a blessing that can be.

Utterly captivating, engrossing, un-put-down-ably, terrifyingly magnificent. In a world filled with dross, Stir is breathtaking.

Pairing food with the nightmare of surviving a brain aneurysm shouldn't work — but under Jessica Fechtor's wise and wonderful narration, the pairing not only works, it shines.

Fechtor's gentle lyricism cannot hide her fierce determination not only to survive, but to flourish.

Written with the flare of a novelist and the precision of an academic, Stir is a brave, beautiful narrative of illness and recovery. But it is not only that. It is a meditation on food and the kitchen, what it means to cook, and how the choices we make at the table can define who we are – and who we want to be.