Kim Sunee was abandoned on the streets of Korea when she was a very little girl. She was then adopted by a young American couple and grew up in New Orleans.
She writes this memoir as a young women and much (but not all) of the book is about her life in France, her life and love affair with Olivier Grignon, a wealthy, mostly sweet, man who adored her. In much of the book, Kim is a young woman living with an older man, living in luxury, and trying to figure out why she can't accept all the richness and love in her life.
She also loves food and she cooks, which definitely gains her an easier entree into the world of Olivier's family, companions and neighbors, and at the end of most of the chapters, there is a recipe, usually French but sometimes Cajun, some dish her beloved Poppy (grandfather) made for the family back in Louisiana.
Olivier has a young daughter, Laure, and Kim writes of her; she writes of Paris, of a trip to Korea, vacations at the beach, of other love affairs, of Flora and Sophie, of her family back in New Orleans....
But she is unhappy. Olivier, perhaps, is too paternal and, while she loves him, she needs to make her own life, all the while haunted by her abandonment.
Jim Harrison notes that "Kim Sunee tells us so much about the French that I never learned in twenty-five trips to Paris...." and the book can be read for that reason alone. But beyond that, it is also a modern story of a modern life...spanning continents and cultures.
Of course, memoirs are by definition, self-absorbed. Still, this seems an honest attempt to tell of her life (so far) with fairness to all those along the way.
And the recipes: How about Chicken Thighs with Cinnamon and Dates? or Chocolate Cake with Mascarpone-Chestnut Cream? or Cream of Chestnut Soup?
(I remembered Maggie talking about chestnuts when she visited this summer, how they would gather them and what they would do with them.)
"For now, I have learned that home is in my heart--in all the places and people I have left behind. It's in the food that I cook and share with others, in the cities I will come to know, and in the offerings of street vendors around the world--from South Korea to Provence--in the markets I have yet to discover." KS
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