"Cakewalk" by Kate Moses; Dial Press (350 pages, $26)
In "Cakewalk," a coming-of-age foodie memoir by Kate Moses, the author dutifully unpacks the events of her "confusing, painful, unforgettable childhood" as her family moves from the Bay Area to Pennsylvania, Virginia and Alaska — and as her parents' marriage disintegrates.
Along the way, Moses takes comfort in creating and consuming sweets, and by ending each chapter with a thematically linked recipe, she encourages the reader to do the same.
The resulting bittersweet memoir is highly palatable though it can go down like too much refined sugar in places: The highs are filled with a filigreed prose style or engrossing conflict followed by occasional crashes into glaring omissions about the narrator's feelings or life. Moses' early years in the 1960s are a cinnamon-and-donut-scented Northern California idyll until success makes her lawyer father a good provider but a terrible husband and dad.
Moses' mother, Kathleen, who would have preferred the life of a Bohemian to that of a housewife, rebels. She tells her children to pretend she's the babysitter, not their mother. And she happens to act like the worst babysitter in the neighborhood. She refuses to cook and leaves her children to fend for themselves off a freezer full of hamburgers and cupcakes baked by Moses.
When Kathleen tells Moses that she has a weight problem, she offers her money for losing weight and shares her personal stash of diet pills. Things worsen when she tries to coax the teenage Moses to tell her husband that their marriage is done. Moses' father responds by verbally abusing his daughter.
Kathleen then drags Moses to a German club picnic where Kathleen attempts to have sex with a man in the back of the family station wagon next to a sleeping Moses. Naturally, Moses is mortified and furious, but rather than letting the reader savor these emotions, she serves up something sweet: a recipe for the very same German pancake for which she had no appetite in real life.
Moses' recipes are sometimes endearing, but they can come off as gimmicky or wholly unappealing, as with the German pancake. Readers don't need to be charmed with confections. We hunger after the real meat and potatoes of Moses' emotions and inner life, which, when delivered, are far more satisfying.
It's not much of a surprise that Moses has a breakdown in college, but things take a remarkable turn for the better after graduation. Every writer needs a mentor. Moses finds hers in M.F.K. Fisher and Kay Boyle, whom she meets via her job at North Point Press and captivates with her baking talents.
But then Moses is suddenly seven months pregnant and standing at the altar. This radical life change comes out of nowhere. From a story-telling perspective, it's a serious hole that no recipe for blondies can fill.
Nonetheless, a reader can't help but want the best for Moses, and it eventually comes through her dedication to raising her son without sacrificing her creative ambitions. "Cakewalk" isn't about becoming a master baker or professional chef or struggling with an eating disorder (though Moses gives hers a passing reference from time to time). It's about surviving a broken family and how domestic skills such as baking are deep, creative expressions that nourish souls through dark times, even if it's to our detriment.
Eventually, a very nice gentleman, Gary Kamiya, then an editor at the San Francisco Examiner's Image magazine and later to be one of the founders of Salon.com, happens into Moses' life. In the book's final scene, Moses is delighted to win a cakewalk, but what our beleaguered narrator has finally won at long last is the game of life. It's a sweet ending, indeed.
Elyssa East is the author of "Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town."
(c) 2010, The Kansas City Star.