Bittersweet reflections prove a comic treat

Food Was Her Country, Marusya Bociurkiw, Caitlin, 176 pages, $22.95

“After my year of extreme desserts ended, I entered into a decade-long dalliance with heterosexuality,” Torontobased filmmaker and professor Marusya Bociurkiw writes in Food Was Her Country: The Memoir of a Queer Daughter, recalling an adolescence in Ottawa stuffed with guilt, discontentment, and fudge ribbon pie (the author includes that recipe and a dozen others).

An absorbing reminiscence that’s sad and consistently regretful — and yet a delight to read — Bociurkiw’s companion volume to Comfort Food for Breakups, her 2007 memoir, meditates on and interweaves family, migration, rejection, history, and loss. And of course food — from activist macrobiotic potlucks to ice cream (which her mother comes to savour after surgery for larynx cancer leaves her speech highly restricted, which Bociurkiw represents as single word sentences: “I. Am. Ashamed.”).

Recollecting moves from Halifax to Vancouver and many addresses in between, Bociurkiw also enchants with a host of life experiences that range from dates (many, often bad) to making art (her life’s eureka).

Throughout, there’s an ongoing, and perhaps ultimately unresolved, ambivalence about family: yearning on the one hand, but also: “I could see no possibility of growth within the sheltering yet confining forest of family.”

After years of being estranged, Bociurkiw’s account of the “fragile, final few years” with her mother are particularly affecting. Not only does her mother suffer, but the reunion is imperfect — time does not necessarily heal all wounds, at least completely — and the author is left with memories of troubled relationships and imaginings of what could have been.