Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci

My reading of non-fiction has been a little behind this year. I think this is probably because I have been using reading as a real key to escapism for the last year with this slightly strange world that we have been living in.

However, I am a Stanley Tucci fan (I mean, who is not?) and, because of this, I thought I had to pick up ‘Taste’, his memoir created through his love of food, and, well, that felt like escapism to me. Especially as I had watched his TV series ‘Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy’ and that had been some wonderful escapsim, so I thought his book probably would be too.

This book was brilliant. There is little more that I can say about it. Stanley Tucci has such a natural writing style that it reads like a friend is just chatting to you about their life and the important part that food has played in their life story. This book is in no way pretentious, it is just a memoir that happens to connect to Tucci’s love of food. I found that I just wanted to keep reading it all the time as I escaped to America and Europe through Stanley Tucci’s tales about his culinary adventures. I mean, the additional anecdotes about his career and the odd friend who may happen to be in the acting world is just an additional treat sprinkled occasionally through the book. (Do not read the Thank Yous first if you are prone to tears when you read – this is a mistake I made and just reinforced why I happen to be a fan of two TV and film stars I am sure we will all know.)

However, this book is also a bit of a love letter to food, especially when Tucci shares his experiences with oral cancer and, of course, how that impacted his relationship with food, but also all the positive experiences he used to have with food and how he had to rebuild that after his cancer.

This is definitely going to be one of the contenders for book of the year for me – well, it could even simply be my non-fiction book of the year right now. Now, I may just pop off and find the audiobook, as I hear that it is also rather wonderful.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.