Appetite for life
Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi’s Instagram account features a post with a quote from Gloria Steinem: “Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.” These words sum up the thrust of Lakshmi’s new memoir,
Love, Loss and What We Ate and, indeed, her entire life story. In his own memoir, her famed ex-husband, literary luminary Salman Rushdie, criticized the model, cookbook author and TV personality for being “ambitious in a way that often obliterated feeling” and grumbled that “she didn’t like playing second fiddle.”
But read through the lens of Lakshmi’s experience: this driving ambition is hardly a liability, but a powerful asset. After all, it’s this hunger to push oneself, to grow, to experience all the world has to offer, that’s taken Lakshmi from a crowded family apartment in India to a cramped studio in New York City, to private jets, European fashion runways, grand balls in glamorous capitals and dinner parties with some of the world’s greatest minds. Few people get to jump between these disparate worlds, but Lakshmi does, and this fact alone makes her memoir a compulsively readable book.
But that’s not all it has to recommend it. Those who follow the tabloids will be aware of the love triangle between Lakshmi, venture capitalist Adam Dell and the late billionaire financier (and former Princess Diana beau) Teddy Forstmann that resulted in the birth of Lakshmi’s daughter Krishna (Dell was the father). This so-called scandal played out on gossip pages the world over and Lakshmi does not hold back in telling her side of the story.
And there’s more. Lakshmi details her battles with body image, her journey to raise awareness about endometriosis (which Lakshmi herself suffers from), as well as her run-ins with all manner of famous faces (the title is inspired by a play by Nora Ephron, whom Lakshmi says mentored her during the last year of her life).
Then, of course, there is the food. The descriptions of the meals that Lakshmi found joy or solace in during every chapter of this colourful story, from the sour pickles and spicy chutneys of her childhood home to the pizzas of Milan, are when Lakshmi’s writing voice is at its most delicious. And when her massive appetite for life is momentarily — and gloriously — satiated.