Reviews with content warning for Dementia - Hungry

I expected this memoir to be funny and appealing to someone of a similar age, if from a very different background. I was surprised by the insights into the changing way we eat food. And I didn't realise that the end section was exactly what I needed to read facing similar issues in my life. It doesn't pretend to be a deeply serious book but the serious aspects are well done.

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missredreads20's review

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funny hopeful reflective medium-paced

4.5

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travelseatsreads's review

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emotional funny inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

5.0

I wasn't expecting a huge amount when I started this audiobook beside mainly food and restaurant talk but it is full to the brim with so much more.
Grace Dent hails from a working class family in Cumbria and has some how (an absolute fluke, as she says herself) become one of Britain's most well known food critics. The opening chapter Grace lovingly speaks about her Dad making 'scetti' (his version of Bolognese) for her as a child and from this point on Grace brings us on the sometimes bumpy emotional rollercoaster of her life. This memoir is really well written and honestly feels like you're just sitting there having a chat. This feeling is increased by the fact that Grace reads the audiobook herself.
This is a beautifully honest memoir full of happiness, sadness, highs and lows but also some fantastic humour. I always enjoyed Dent as a critic on MasterChef but now I absolutely adore her and hope to see much more of her work in the future.

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martha_is_reading's review against another edition

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emotional funny reflective sad medium-paced

4.25

A memoir of Grace Dent's working class childhood in Carlisle, how her ambition to be a writer brought her to London and how her family brought her back to the North. Food is weaved throughout in a way that is neither intrusive nor trite, it is intrinsically linked to her upbringing, to her later career and its limitations in being able to solve some of the problems she faces in her life.

Having only encountered Dent in Masterchef, it had taken be a few series to get past the slightly barbed, aloof vibe she gives off, but this book was all humanity. She was thoroughly relatable and her journey to revered food critic was reassuringly ordinary - full of instances where she didn't have a clue about wine and was fully aware of the absurdity of some of the food she was encountering. Her frequent imposter syndrome made me like her all the more as a woman in a mainly male industry. The way in which she described her experiences caring for her father was surprisingly devastating, I finished the book in tears.

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