“Whenever I start dating someone new, I just can’t hold
back” begins author Giulia Melucci’s
memoir— I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti. The Brooklyn-born author goes on to recount her lovelorn days and how
she overfed her ex-boyfriends with an array of scrumptious pasta dishes
(linguini, pastina, rigatoni, spaghetti, etc.).
This “chick lit” book charts Melucci’s fruitless foray into the dating
world: From Kit, her first love, through
Lachlan, the love who inspired her to write this memoir, and all the artfully
cooked meals-and-recipes in between.
Each chapter—with titles such as “The Victory Breakfast,”
”The Ethan Binder School of Cooking,” “Marcus Caldwell Ate and Ran,”—de-constructs
the relationship with each boyfriend.
Most are writers (if not starving, then frugal) Melucci loved, cooked
for, then was dumped by. In the process,
she explores the nexus between gastronomy, appetite, and love.
Toward the end of the book, Melucci explains how she manages
a single woman’s existence in a couple’s world. “My own dinner parties,” she writes,
“are full of couples. . . . And as my guests compliment my cooking, which
feels great, I also have to hear them wonder aloud why it is I'm not married,
which feels awful. The person who brings
it up is usually a man, a man married to a woman who doesn't cook.”
Melucci is well-educated, erudite, cosmopolitan, witty,
employed at the time as an editor/vice-president at Harper’s Magazine. A rock-music aficionado. A wine connoisseur. She knows a soufflé from a sorbet. She jogs, does Pilates, and summers in the
Hamptons.
Sometime after Ethan and before Marcus, I wished Melucci
would go back to Ethan—a Rolling Stone Magazine/MTV writer and her true
love. For they had mutual friends,
interests, and temperaments, each beloved by the other’s family. Instead, she allowed herself to be dumped by
Mitch, who ended his break-up e-mail with, “. . . I just don’t feel like having
a girlfriend right now.”
Then, later, Lachlan–an obscure Scottish novelist when she
met him—who uttered these “plenty perceptive” words: ”The only thing wrong with
you is that you think something is wrong with you. . . .“ After she managed the herculean feat of
getting him an agent, and, ultimately, an enviable book deal, Lachlan
“un-friended” her. He did not marry
her. (To be fair, she seemed to dislike
him by the time of their break-up.)
Toward the end of the book, Melucci purchased her dream
apartment--whose previous tenant found her husband on www.match.com. Hopefully, the apartment is blessed by a
fairy-techno godmother who grants each single female tenant her ultimate
wish. For we desperately wish the author
to find true and lasting love, and to live happily ever after! (Probably, Melucci needs a therapist, a
matchmaker, or both.)
I Loved, I Lost, I Made
Spaghetti is a witty, insightful, fun read as you sprawl on your couch (or,
in warm weather, in your backyard)—in which author Giulia Melucci shares the
angst of being a sassy, independent/co-dependent, single woman in a
cosmopolitan city.
–Yolanda A. Reid
__________________________________
Copyright © 2012 by Y.A. Reid
__________________________________
Copyright © 2012 by Y.A. Reid
No comments:
Post a Comment