Morrell received a comprehensive education in food and drink from parents who ran a wine business. Moreover, her mother schooled her in social graces and an appreciation for beauty and knowledge, telling her, “Being erudite will only help you in life.” Morrell is erudite indeed, dropping $10 words (exuded, charlatan, unctuous) exactly where they fit. She’s also spectacularly unlucky throughout this memoir, from a terrible accident that ended her girlhood dream of being an equestrian to attaching herself to men who had “a tendency to fuck things up.” Her mother imparted “a restless sense of striving and possibility in what was to come.” That striving is constant, beginning with Morrell’s determination to become an actor, with such serendipitous moments as a dance with Sam Shepard “amid a sea of coked-up hipsters” and an admonition from Sigourney Weaver not to waste her time going to drama school but instead to light out to Hollywood. Never mind that the one actor she knew had to hold down three jobs in order to get by (“but heaven forbid I should read the signs”). Acting didn’t work out, but there was always the “inevitable” waitressing—and then culinary school, which taught her plenty of techniques but led to the resolve not to become a chef but a writer about food. Morrell takes an often rueful tone, fittingly, with ever-growing self-awareness about the things that make life worth living when it’s so short, tragic, and often disappointing. But, as she has it, “Who could stay sad and full of self-pity while eating an open-faced pile of mortadella, thin as hand-sewn lace, with shaved Comté for a hat, all atop a little brioche raft?”