From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home

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She had nearly been speaking in tongues on the three-hour speed boat ride we had had to take to get from the mainland to Stromboli. I expected to follow their love story and then feel the loss, grieving alongside Tembi, but it never happened.

He was a student activist; she was the dean’s-list beauty who stood front row when he spoke on campus. Where once Tembi was estranged from Saro’s family and his origins, now she finds solace and nourishment—literally and spiritually—at her mother in law’s table. A nocturnal bike ride through the center of Florence on a foggy morning with an Italian chef at my side.The grainy but wispy jazz vocals of Paolo Conte came through the speakers, the dessert case was nearly empty save a single portion of tiramisù. I love how even though she’s gone through such a tremendous loss, she can also acknowledge how much she’s gained. After his death, being with his family was like looking at the flip side of that tapestry, the stitching showed, the bulky knots, the places where the fringe had frayed but it was still part of the same beautiful piece.

I wrote term papers on the Medicis’ artistic rift with Pope Leo X and moved into my own apartment with two other women—one American, one Canadian, and one very impish Italian DJ who slept with the Canadian. I learned that he had been born in Sicily to farmers and had lived briefly in Buffalo, New York, when his family had relocated there during his teen years. An incredible journey through Tembi’s life, the book tracks her relationship with her late husband, Saro through three summers spent in the Sicilian countryside. And over the course of the night, as I fumbled through my kindergarten Italian, I stopped blushing, growing more and more confident with each conversation. Tembi and Saro build their life together, living in LA, where she is an actress, he a chef, and together raising their daughter, Zoela.I especially loved how she forged a bond with her mother-in-law and connected with her husband's Sicilian heritage. From Scratch chronicles three summers Tembi spends in Sicily with her daughter, Zoela, as she begins to piece together a life without her husband in his tiny hometown hamlet of farmers. That first year they brought over some of Saro’s ashes, and though in each year that followed the sadness hadn’t truly dissipated, there was still, somehow, more joy in the simplicity of the Sicilian way of life, in her hard-won acceptance into a new family, and in food prepared with love. Blinking snow from my eyes, wondering what on earth could have happened, I pedaled my way back across the Arno to my apartment. The way she looked at me when it was over — I feel like she could understand her own life, which has been so informed by the loss of her uncle.