Event: What We Carry: Women Writing Food, Grief, and Memory

Wednesday, July 1 at 111 Broadway in the Financial District.

Doors open 6:00 | Talk 6:30-7:30 | Book Signing 7:30-8:00 pm

Food memoirs have long offered writers a way to tell stories that extend far beyond the plate. In particular, many of the most resonant contemporary food memoirs by women use food as a lens for exploring grief, caregiving, family history, addiction, trauma, and survival. While food writing by men has often centered professional identity, culinary mastery, or life in restaurants, women food memoirists have frequently turned toward the emotional and domestic interior—using meals, recipes, and acts of feeding as a way to process loss, longing, and transformation.

Join acclaimed authors Laurie Woolever (Care and Feeding), Lisa Donovan (Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger), and Youngmi Mayer (I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying) for a candid conversation about writing through food as a way of making sense of complicated lives. Across three distinct memoirs—by turns funny, devastating, and deeply intimate—these writers explore how food becomes a language for grief, identity, addiction, estrangement, and survival.

Moderated by New Yorker staff writer Helen Rosner, this discussion will consider the possibilities of food memoir beyond the recipe or restaurant narrative, and how women writers have expanded the genre to hold stories of loss, resilience, and emotional complexity. Together, they will explore what it means to write from hunger—literal, emotional, and inherited—and how food can both conceal and reveal the truths we struggle to say directly.

Non-alcoholic beverages generously provided by Sober in Central Park

Tickets are non-refundable. You will not receive a physical ticket. Your name will be on a list at the door. This event will not be recorded.

Please note that this event is at 111 Broadway (corner of Thames St) at the NYC Food Stories by Kitchen Arts & Letters pop-up store.