Cakewalk: A Memoir
by Kate Moses
- Used
- Hardcover
- Condition
- USED Good
- ISBN 10
- 0385342985
- ISBN 13
- 9780385342988
- Seller
-
Montclair, New Jersey, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
Synopsis
From the author of the internationally acclaimed Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath comes a funny, touching memoir of a crummy--and crumby--childhood.Growing up in the 1960s and '70s, Kate Moses was surrounded by sugar: Twinkies in the basement freezer, honey on the fried chicken, Baby Ruth bars in her father's sock drawer. But sweetness of the more intangible variety was harder to come by. Her parents were disastrously mismatched, far too preoccupied with their mutual misery to notice its effects on their kids. A frustrated artist, Kate's beautiful, capricious mother lived in a constant state of creative and marital emergency, enlisting Kate as her confidante--"We're the girls, we have to stick together"--and instructing her three children to refer to her in public as their babysitter. Kate's father was aloof, ambitious, and prone to blasts of withering abuse increasingly directed at the daughter who found herself standing between her embattled parents. Kate looked for comfort in the imaginary worlds of books and found refuge in the kitchen, where she taught herself to bake and entered the one realm where she was able to wield control.Telling her own story with the same lyricism, compassion, and eye for lush detail she brings to her fiction, coupled with the candor and humor she is known for in her personal essays, Kate Moses leavens each tale of her coming-of-age in Cakewalk with a recipe from her lifetime of confectionary obsession. There is the mysteriously erotic German Chocolate Cake implicated in a birds-and-bees speech when Kate was seven, the gingerbread people her mother baked for Christmas the year Kate officially realized she was fat, the chocolate chip cookies Kate used to curry favor during a hilariously gruesome adolescence, and the brownies she baked for her idol, the legendary M.F.K. Fisher, who pronounced them "delicious."Filled with the abundance and joy that were so lacking in Kate's youth, Cakewalk is a wise, loving tribute to life in all its sweetness as well as its bitterness and, ultimately, a recipe for forgiveness.From the Hardcover edition.
Reviews
(Log in or Create an Account first!)
Details
- Bookseller
- Montclair Book Center (US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 112457
- Title
- Cakewalk: A Memoir
- Author
- Kate Moses
- Format/Binding
- Hardcover
- Book Condition
- USED Good
- Quantity Available
- 1
- ISBN 10
- 0385342985
- ISBN 13
- 9780385342988
- Publisher
- The Dial Press
- Place of Publication
- New York, New York, U.s.a.
- Date Published
- May 2010
- Pages
- 368
Terms of Sale
Montclair Book Center
Shipping charges listed are estimates based on the average book. If a book is especially large, or is a set of multiple books, we may request that you pay an additional shipping charge. All books may be returned within one week of receipt, with prior notification. If book is not as described then a full refund will be issued. If the book is returned for some other reason then it will be refunded less shipping cost and possibly a 20% restocking fee. All international addresses must contain a street number or the order will be returned to us by the post office.