Best books… Padma Lakshmi

Author and model Padma Lakshmi is the host of Top Chef, Bravo’s long-running TV series. Her memoir, Love, Loss, and What We Ate, is available from Ecco Press at £18.99

Peggy Guggenheim by Francine Prose, 2015 (Yale £16.99). An empathetic study of an extraordinary woman’s life, by a truly gifted writer. While detailing Guggenheim’s incredible, unique contribution as a patron of the arts, Prose presents her as both glamorous and fragile.

The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr, 1995 (Pan Macmillan £9.99). If any memoirist tells you they haven’t been influenced by The Liars’ Club, they are either lying or uninformed. The genius of Karr’s memoir is that it’s really not about her, but her parents, told with love while fearlessly illustrating their faults. The Art of Eating by M.F.K. Fisher, 1954 (out of print). No other writer has inspired me more. Fisher has an uncanny knack for taking something mundane and rendering it sublime. She salts her writing with good common sense and peppers it with a wicked wit.

The Tummy Trilogy by Calvin Trillin, 1983 (out of print). “Bud” Trillin of The New Yorker basically invented the genre of food-focused US travel writing. The Tummy Trilogy can make you salivate over a humble bagel from New York’s Russ and Daughters, or over a slice of pizza from, of all places, Kansas City. Fat Girl by Judith Moore, 2005 (out of print). Moore spares no detail in this raw look inside a young girl’s insecurity, self-loathing and selfishness. She is utterly unflinching in her laser-sharp descriptions of food, body, heart and loneliness.

From Beirut to Jerusalem

by Thomas L. Friedman, 1990 (Harpercollins £14.99). This book opened my eyes to how politics a world away can have a huge human cost. Drawing on his experiences as a reporter in Lebanon and Israel, Friedman made me understand who the people on the ground were, and how different and the same we all really are.