Tembi’s memoir centers around her beautiful love story with her late husband—how they met, and how his passing affected her and their daughter. I intimately know grief and I’ve read other books that fully embrace the experience and strongly echoed my experience. My heart is full, and aching with how real the fragility of life is, and how we should cherish every moment with our spouses and loved ones. Booths wrapped the circumference of the intimate candlelit dining room filled with communal butcher-block tables.

The journey I was willing to take had no guidelines or examples I could look to in either my own life or the lives of my parents. The account of how they met is truly the stuff that study abroad dreams are made of; girl goes to Italy in college, meets an Italian man and falls in love, they get married. Okay, there are some “Godfather” jokes, but in the end, a Sicilian neighbor, who does not understand a syllable of English, tells her family that their daughter, Tembi, “is one of us. Tembi added that the show contains a message only for Zoela to notice — one the rest of us will pass by.With lyrical writing; sensual descriptions of Italian food; and a powerful love story that transcends barriers of language, culture, and more; readers can’t help but feel everything with Tembi as she guides us through her journey.

How could I have been so stupid as to have a one-night stand on a tiny island during the off-season, where the only departing ferry left once every five days?There was just one problem: Saro’s traditional Sicilian family did not approve of him marrying a black American woman, an actress no less.

I did shed a few tears along the way, but I wasn’t as greatly impacted by the story as I had anticipated. In the memoir, Tembi tracks three summers spent in Sicily after Saro’s death (incluidng one summer with her whole entire family, like in the show).She is the creative voice behind The Kitchen Widow , an online grief support community that has received mentions in The New York Times and The Guardian. Connor had mentioned that she had been a theater major, and that made perfect sense as she carried herself as though she were stepping onto or off of a stage. TL;DR: A stunning memoir which blends food writing, grief exploration, cross-cultural relationships, and a beautiful love story. I had had a kind of bifurcated childhood, trying to fit into whatever configuration of my parents’ life was presently in formation.