Crumbs is a food memoir manuscript in progress.

Paris, March 2020. A new mother, I have travelled back home to be with my family as my father lays dying of brain cancer. While out grocery shopping with my husband and our son in his stroller, I suffer a massive epilepsy attack and am diagnosed with a brain tumour myself. Questions flood my mind: How could my body have grown two things at once and not given me a clue that one of them was in my brain? If it was all to die in my thirties, why did I spend so much of my twenties battling an eating disorder? How am I to mother, feed my son now that breastfeeding is off the table? It is when the cruellest of questions arises—what do I want him to remember me by? — that I start journeying on my trail of taste and illness. I find answers when I turn to the tools my hands know best: a chef’s knife, a box of family archives, and a keyboard.

About how we find physical and intellectual sustenance in food to surmount life’s toughest moments, Crumbs is a story of food and family that takes its readers inside the home kitchen of several generations of French cuisinières. In each chapter, I leave behind breadcrumbs—passages of various lengths, handwritten recipes, food photographs—and lead my reader along my trail of taste and illness.   

First person essays related to this project have appeared in a number of publication:

“Cancoillottee, [kɑ̃kwajɔt], “Kon-koy-ot,” If Memory Serves: Stories from the Table, Cynthia Greenlee, ed, Good Printed Things, 2026.

“Souvenirs of an Awake Craniotomy,” Brain, Volume 148, Issue 5, May 2025.

**Winner of the Best Essay Prize.

“Chiang Mai 2015,” Gastronomica, Volume 25, Issue 1, Spring 2025. Listen to the Gastronomica podcast about this piece.

“On Breastfeeding,” Adelaide Magazine, Year VIII, Number 60, August 2023.

“Don’t Wait for Me for Lunch: A Voyage and Memory Collage through a Family Food Archive.” Gastronomica, Volume 22, Issue 4, Winter 2022. Listen to the Gastronomica podcast about this piece.