Author Description

Traversing decades and continents, Comfort Food for Breakups is an elegiac, sensual, and beguiling memoir about food, family, and personal history by fiction writer and filmmaker Marusya Bociurkiw. In these intimate vignettes, food—soup, eggs, chocolate truffle cake, perogies—nourishes, comforts, and heals the wounds of the past. Knishes recall a father haunted by memories of time spent in a concentration camp during World War II; chocolate evokes memories of queer girls and liasons in dim lesbian bars. For the author, both at home across Canada and in her travels through North America and Europe, food becomes her salvation, and a way to engage with the world. Thoughtful, moving, and passionate, Comfort Food for Breakups muses upon the ways in which food intersects with a nexus of hungers: for intimacy, for sex, for home.