Cover Image: Everything Is Under Control

Everything Is Under Control

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Member Reviews

I'm currently clearing out all of the books that were published in 2019-20 from my title feedback view!

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Fast read. Was surprised to be at the end of the book so quickly.
The author's writing style was unique and made me move through the book quickly.

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Thanks for my gifted digital copy.
Everything under control is a book you don't want to out down, it is a memoir but it is also a recipe book, the memoir is sharp and raw in some parts, especially when she talks about motherhood.
The writing draws the reader in completely, I wanted to read more about Phyllis' life and her family.
A book to read and than keep in the kitchen to try the recipes.

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I loved reading Phyllis Grant's memoir. It is intimate, and at times brutally hard to read., but at the same time also hopeful and full of love, understanding and compassion. I am amazed at her versatility as an individual, hopping from one career to another, and , from one end of the country to the other at the same time.
I love the cover of the book and that she included all of the recipes that have been passed down through the generations in her family.
I highly recommend it. Thank you @netgalley for my copy in return for my honest review.

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Such a fragile, touching, irreverent,real account. As someone who has spent numerous hours on the floor and in the kitchen of restaurants I found moments of this harrowing and flashpoint I’d long forgotten. The road from therapy to culinary school. The evolution to the making of this honest tale of a life full of conflict and resolution. Regardless of where the path of life has taken you this moment of reflection is worth your time.

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Grant is skilled at boiling key life events down to their essence, but perhaps she’s reduced them beyond that deep Potlicker soul that makes you nearly lick the pot bottom when you’re out of bread.

A bicoastal narrative during which a woman comes of age working her way through departing the dance world, working odd jobs, finding her self in food, then love, then marriage, carriage, postpartum depression and various professions that heal and sustain her. Grant becomes a Doula and later a chef (what type remains unclear to the casual observer of off network food personalities).

It’s a brief work with organizational issues that need further consideration enabling the work to read as a draft and instead of a full blown narrative. Food takes a long time to explain itself via the recipes. Recipes are friendly to read but way too wordy. Recipes are tacked on at the end of the book as opposed to nestling them within the very briefly describe moments and changes in grants life. Method and intent read as disconnected which blurs the purpose of memoir: Share one story and tell the reader what they are learning from you.

Grant leaves her readers charmed but unfulfilled. In her work are interesting situations and people who pepper her life. Rather than offer too much ingredient Grant serves up the stripped meatless bones some marrow for flavor.
The menu of recipes is intriguing but is packed in too late with no meditation or conclusion.

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At first, did not think I would like this book. It was too disjointed. I couldn't get into it until I did. Then I could not put it down. I was hooked. I was fascinated. The author wants to be a dancer. Moves from California to New York and attend Julliard. She graduates but she can't be a dancer because she can't get through an audition. She decides to become a chef. She works in kitchens. The food scene in New York is brutal. Long hours, injuries, and pain. Like I said fascinating. I have been so sheltered in my life. I live vicariously through other people and their memoirs. So many books. So little time. I digress. She marries. Has kids, many miscarriages, and wicked postpartum depression. Everyone survives. The author, husband, kids, and the marriage. They even witness the twin towers coming down and move to California. The finale is the recipes. Many of the dishes she talks about in the book you can make because the recipes are included. The Tarte Tatin and the vanilla bean custard ice cream are delicious. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for a review.

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First up is a new release that’s a read-in-one-sitting deal, in case you want a quick but fairly intense and even gritty read: Phyllis Grant’s Everything is Under Control.

Grant was a dancer training at Julliard, living in New York City as a teenager, who developed an eating disorder as she tried to navigate life at this impressionable time in a trying place. She eventually started working in fancy restaurant kitchens before packing up and moving to California post-9/11, marrying her long-time partner, having kids, and finding an abundance of joy in cooking.

It’s written in a vignette-y, diary-like style, which I love. I especially enjoyed the early parts that were set in New York, where her musings on strange city life and being young and feeling out one’s place and her specific problems (anorexia, sexual harassment in the restaurant industry) were so aching and stark and powerful.

But once it turned into a motherhood story, it lost me. If you like this kind of theme and trajectory, you’ll love it. If you don’t, it’s worth knowing that it gets pretty graphic, placenta-eating and pre-birth perineum massages and all. I was annoyed at how much of it ended up being about birth and motherhood and not about food. Although of course some connection to food and her favored recipes is loosely tied in, I didn’t find the connection strong enough to warrant so much time spent on these topics.

The included recipes sound good but nothing that I bookmarked. It’s more that I like her style and tastes even if I wasn’t rushing to make these. She has a haunting, often poetic writing voice, and although it shifted focus often from scenes or periods of her life I would’ve liked to have seen explored in more depth, the form was interesting and she has an appealingly wry, clear-eyed storytelling style.

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Phyllis Grant has written a memoir relatively early in her life. The freshness of her memories from young adulthood make for vivid descriptions of the rights of passage often glossed over by authors with greater distance. She writes about the humiliation of unwanted advances at work, the intense pain of childbirth, the euphoria of finding her life’s calling, and the subsequent despair of realizing she was wrong.

Everything Is Under Control offers brief but powerful flashes from Grant’s time as a dancer at Julliard in New York City through to her family life with two young children in Berkeley, California. She tells her story through its emotional turning points: leaving home for college, finding the love of her life, leaving the dance world for restaurant work, and becoming a mother.

Grant’s writing pulses with the intensity of one’s twenties and all the yearning, passion, and searing disappointment that fills those years. As she passes a restaurant back door in a New York City alley, she thinks, “I want my hair to smell like chocolate and garlic and fish. I want to lean in and carefully place the roasted beets next to the potato puree. I want a purpose.”

Her love of food is a throughline in the book. As a child, she watches her grandmother cook, and in her early days at Julliard she gorges herself on New York City’s culinary delights. Finally, she makes the leap to working in restaurants as a pastry chef and garde-manger.

When the grueling restaurant world spits her out, she cooks on her own terms for her husband and children. She clearly delights in the smells, textures, and emotions of cooking. It serves as a soothing pleasure and healing balm in her house.

When she cooks dinner for her husband after they fight, “the meat cooks all day, the smells get sucked into the wall-to-wall carpeting, the sofa, the winter coats. Meat is under my fingernails. Fat drippings speckle my boots. We fill warm tortillas with the spicy meat, cabbage salad, jalapeno pickles. We splash it all with crème fraiche.”

Grant’s struggle with postpartum depression creates the most jarring and difficult moments in the book. She describes a descent into mental illness after the birth of her first child that includes thoughts of violence toward her baby. “Images pulse in my head, violent flashes in which I smash her brain with a flashlight. . . .”

After she emerges from the dysphoria of new motherhood, she tries relentlessly for another baby. Against all odds, she gives birth again, only to feel the same horrible despair engulf her. Now, as the mother of a difficult toddler and a newborn, she writes, “My screaming babies are always with me.” She describes standing upside down in a hot shower to try to escape her mental anguish.

The book closes with recipes for meals that have appeared in her stories, food that she makes for her family with skills honed in restaurants. As one might expect from a chef, she provides detailed, precise instructions and multiple variations of the dishes, from avocado bowls to caramelized onion tart with anchovies and olives. She also includes desserts like hazelnut butter cookies and strawberry balsamic tart.

Grant’s stark, spare memoir feels like the literary equivalent a few bold slashes of color across a canvas. She briefly touches on loaded topics that could be books unto themselves: the culture of elite female dancers, being a woman in the restaurant world, coping with infertility, and surviving postpartum depression.

Grant illuminates the human condition in sometimes breathtaking ways—readers will surely see themselves on these pages—but she fails to fully reveal herself. Offering only the gut punches of a life story is a difficult way for an author to build rapport with readers. Grant’s book leaves one wondering if she is likeable, if she has a sense of humor, if anything embarrasses her. One finds oneself wanting more, which is not necessarily a bad thing—in a book or a meal.

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I enjoyed this memoir of Phyllis Grant’s life, family, and connection with food. This was a quick and interesting read. I haven’t tried any of the recipes, but they all sound great.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

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A bit of an odd format for a memoir--a lot of the chapters/passages were very short and abrupt. It read more like a journal or blog. I did like her and the recipes were a cute idea. I didn't feel like it dove too deeply into anythough.

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It's not often that I take a chance on a memoir from an unknown author. Forging a connection deep enough to invest fully into a random person's life story can be hard for me to achieve, personally. So, imagine my surprise when I slipped so deep, right into emotional investment with Phyllis's relationship with food and motherhood.

Some of the major themes explored so beautifully in the memoir are emotional connections to food, eating disorders, motherhood and postpartum depression. The first half of the book focuses on her familial relationship with food, being a dancer and then trying to make it in a professional kitchen. Once we reached the stressful environment of the restaurant scene, I just couldn't put it down. Each story of food guides us through Phyllis's life, little mile markers that ground our experience of often dark subjects. It chilled me how much she decided to frankly speak about her experience with postpartum depression. As a non-binary reader who doesn't often connect with themes of motherhood, I felt myself mourning for her, and even with her. I don't know how else to say it, but her story was captivating.

As the title suggests, there are recipes included in the book. These are inserted in the latter half, after the narrative portion and still include Phyllis's warm, familiar voice. The recipes range from short and sweet to higher end but all offer elevation and improvement for home cooks at any level. It truly surprised me how I noticed each and every one of the recipes from stories in the book, no matter how fleeting they were mentioned. Some of them, like the vanilla bean ice cream, stirred an emotional response in me, triggering my mind to recall the story it was mentioned in. It's this feeling that makes me believe that this half narrative, half cookbook experiment is so successful. Phyllis Grant absolutely nails this experimental style and it was such a wonderful ride to experience. If you're a foodie, a young woman, a mother, or a just reader looking for a captivating story to empathize and grow with, this might be for you.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux who provided me with an Advance Readers Copy in exchange for an honest review. Everything Is Under Control A Memoir with Recipes is out on April, 21st! Support your local bookstores, please.

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I knew nothing about this book or author but the cover intrigued me. It’s a quick read and I really enjoyed her writing style. It’s available later this month - thanks so much to Netgalley and the publisher for the free copy in exchange for my honest review!

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I am a fiend for food memoirs and listed this on my Book Lovers Pizza blog as one of my most anticipated foodie memoirs of 2020. In the middle of the night, not able to sleep from anxiety during quarantine, I chuckled when I came upon this title on my Kindle app (because Everything is NOT Under Control for me right now.) What I found was a really lovely series of vignette or diary entry-type pages and stories of Grant's life as a chef, mother and later, a midwife. It's kind of a "hit the highlights (and lowlights)" type look at her life written in a raw, emotional and very poetic format. The gourmet recipes at the end were simple, delicious, and look incredible. This is a very short and interesting peek into her life....one that, like many of us, has its serious bumps and is far from perfect. I loved it.

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A gorgeous story that perfectly captures the female experience. Concise, heartbreaking, and completely moving. I adored it!

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Thank you to the author, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and NetGalley, for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This honest and unflinching portrayal of the author's life, her relationship, marriage and motherhood drew me in. However, I am fairly sure that I only read a fraction of the book - the formatting both in Kindle and in PDF download was very strange, and the book was much too short viz. the length it should have been. I wish I could have read the entire book!

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Phylis Grant has written an open honest look at her life her marriage her pregnancies no one is spared.She also shares with us her delicious recipes. Everything told in short paragraph spurts.I laughed I sympathized and I will be cooking sharing her recipes with my family.I found this a really delightful read.#netgalley#fsg

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I've always loved Phyllis Grant's writing and her recipes. This book didn't disappoint. It is funny and unflinching in her honest portrayal of her marriage and motherhood. A fast and worthwhile read.

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I love food memoirs and I read this in one sitting - a beautiful, lyrical, and sparse memoir about a woman who tried it all and struggled with motherhood and love, but her heart always went back to food. The writing style was interesting, I felt like I was reading her diary. I love reading all the descriptions of food - I have never read a more beautiful paragraph about the making of a tuna salad sandwich. The collection of eclectic recipes at the end was a great touch, I wish more of them were related to the vignettes that she brushes upon in her story.

I received this book from the publisher in exchange for a honest review

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I tore through EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL in one sitting and absolutely loved it. Phyllis Grant is an evocative writer and her love for food - real food, with carbs and fats and calories - truly comes through in her prose, woven through with sparsely-written, but intimate anecdotes about eating disorders, pregnancy and postpartum depression, and marriage. In a market saturated with cookbooks written by lifestyle bloggers that gloss over the painful and messy elements of parenting and real life, this is a real treat. I can't wait to review this in my newsletter.

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