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All Things Edible, Random & Odd: Essays on Grief, Love & Food
Through lyrical and intimate personal essays, All Things Edible, Random and Odd delivers a portrait not just of a father who died, but of a daughter who kept living. Sheila Squillante’s heartfelt and humorous essays introduce us to a father—a 1980s businessman and early adopter of the term “foodie”—and a daughter’s complicated grief. It also moves beyond that grief, to embrace the intricacies and delights of how life grows from it.
Food remains central throughout the collection with essays that serve up a menu (and sometimes recipes!) of Hawaiian beach seaweed, turtle soup, and fermented Icelandic shark. Nostalgia clashes with reality, through stories connecting memories to taste.
With poetic prose, Squillante expresses the complexities of unresolved relationships, the importance of shared experiences, and how family and food make us who we are.
Food remains central throughout the collection with essays that serve up a menu (and sometimes recipes!) of Hawaiian beach seaweed, turtle soup, and fermented Icelandic shark. Nostalgia clashes with reality, through stories connecting memories to taste.
With poetic prose, Squillante expresses the complexities of unresolved relationships, the importance of shared experiences, and how family and food make us who we are.
216 pages, Paperback
Published November 28, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 4, 2023
"All Things Edible, Random & Odd" comprises of essays which contemplate upon Sheila Squillante's life as a poet, writer, daughter, and mother. This was my first encounter with the author's works, and so my impressions are only formed based on the basis of the writings in this collection.
Throughout 31 essays, Squillante weaves recipes and foodie tales together with anecdotes and observations on her relationships, most notably with her father -- a consummate foodie and traveller by his daughter's standards -- her ex-husband, husband, and children. The intimate revelations within her writing draws you in somehow, and though I wasn't impressed initially when I started this, by the end of this collection I found myself loving the selections. I particularly loved the essays that talked about her complicated relationship with her father, her struggles with her ex and her husband, as well as the challenges of motherhood.
The varieties of topics discussed and the candidness of some of Squillante's observations make this for an interesting read for those who are fans of autobiographical works in the veins of Annie Ernaux and the likes, so do give this a read if you're a fan of such writings.
With thanks to Edelweiss+ & the publisher for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.
Throughout 31 essays, Squillante weaves recipes and foodie tales together with anecdotes and observations on her relationships, most notably with her father -- a consummate foodie and traveller by his daughter's standards -- her ex-husband, husband, and children. The intimate revelations within her writing draws you in somehow, and though I wasn't impressed initially when I started this, by the end of this collection I found myself loving the selections. I particularly loved the essays that talked about her complicated relationship with her father, her struggles with her ex and her husband, as well as the challenges of motherhood.
The varieties of topics discussed and the candidness of some of Squillante's observations make this for an interesting read for those who are fans of autobiographical works in the veins of Annie Ernaux and the likes, so do give this a read if you're a fan of such writings.
With thanks to Edelweiss+ & the publisher for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.
October 5, 2024
This is an absolutely gorgeous book in every possible way.
The cover is what drew me in---this art style is my favorite. Of course, the subject matter is my favorite as well.
I ordered my copy from the Society For Unusual Books, which was kind of a bonus.
So then I got the book and learned that the author lives and teaches in Pittsburgh, and some of the essays are about Pittsburgh places and things. The stories of going to Strip District Meats in search of turtle meat and the Hindu Temple in Monroeville to expose her kids to pantheism were particularly evocative of the intersection of food and spirit and place.
The essays are all over the place in a really good way---most of them touch on her relationship with her father--and the early death of her father--through food. Later stories focus on her husband and kids, and that next iteration of family life.
The final few pieces really hit me the hardest. Less food related, but very much about love and grief.
I'm so glad I was led to this book, and looking forward to reading more of her work.
The cover is what drew me in---this art style is my favorite. Of course, the subject matter is my favorite as well.
I ordered my copy from the Society For Unusual Books, which was kind of a bonus.
So then I got the book and learned that the author lives and teaches in Pittsburgh, and some of the essays are about Pittsburgh places and things. The stories of going to Strip District Meats in search of turtle meat and the Hindu Temple in Monroeville to expose her kids to pantheism were particularly evocative of the intersection of food and spirit and place.
The essays are all over the place in a really good way---most of them touch on her relationship with her father--and the early death of her father--through food. Later stories focus on her husband and kids, and that next iteration of family life.
The final few pieces really hit me the hardest. Less food related, but very much about love and grief.
I'm so glad I was led to this book, and looking forward to reading more of her work.
November 29, 2023
This is my favorite kind of book: beautiful essays about the relationship between food and family, grieving and memory. Some are presented as recipes, some as reflections, all achingly honest about both the bitter and the sweet.
Her father is the gourmand of her childhood, but her mother cooked, and I think my favorite in the collection is American Home Cookbook, about the role of that particular cookbook in her family life, her father choosing recipes from it for her mother to cook, as in this tense scene:
“In this memory, my mother has worked to prepare something she believes my father will enjoy: rosemary rubbed lamb chops, maybe, or it could have been chicken Marsala, slippery with mushrooms and wine-sweet sauce. She brings it to the table with, I imagine, a combination of both pride (she knows she's a good cook) and anxiety (she knows she can never please him), and we prepare to eat. Side dishes: rice pilaf and buttered niblet corn.
"It's brown."
My father stares at his plate, fork poised, aggravated. Two words. I see my mother deflate, her shoulders slump, her eyes lose focus. She's gone without a fight.
And yet, her own relationship with food is amazingly uncomplicated and pleasurable. I loved reading about the feasts she makes to share with friends, and especially the essays about cooking with and for her children, one as curious an eater as she and her late father, the other more like a hummingbird, subsisting, they joke, on “dust motes floating in sunbeams.”
In this and throughout, as in a well planned menu, she strikes a lovely balance between the pathos and the humor.
Her father is the gourmand of her childhood, but her mother cooked, and I think my favorite in the collection is American Home Cookbook, about the role of that particular cookbook in her family life, her father choosing recipes from it for her mother to cook, as in this tense scene:
“In this memory, my mother has worked to prepare something she believes my father will enjoy: rosemary rubbed lamb chops, maybe, or it could have been chicken Marsala, slippery with mushrooms and wine-sweet sauce. She brings it to the table with, I imagine, a combination of both pride (she knows she's a good cook) and anxiety (she knows she can never please him), and we prepare to eat. Side dishes: rice pilaf and buttered niblet corn.
"It's brown."
My father stares at his plate, fork poised, aggravated. Two words. I see my mother deflate, her shoulders slump, her eyes lose focus. She's gone without a fight.
And yet, her own relationship with food is amazingly uncomplicated and pleasurable. I loved reading about the feasts she makes to share with friends, and especially the essays about cooking with and for her children, one as curious an eater as she and her late father, the other more like a hummingbird, subsisting, they joke, on “dust motes floating in sunbeams.”
In this and throughout, as in a well planned menu, she strikes a lovely balance between the pathos and the humor.
March 5, 2024
A life remembered through food is my new favorite kind of memoir, and All Things Edible, Random, and Odd is an excellent addition to this subgenre. Like Crying in H Mart, Squillante explores her coming-of-womanhood via specific food memories, many of which center around the long grief of her father's death and the difficult but ultimately joyful journey to herself. However, Squillante's story is firmly Gen X, and her experiences of marriage, motherhood, and family offer a stew of an equally rich yet radically different flavor. Some standouts for me were the title essay—a rumination on the challenge of writing through grief—"Tornado," a short, stunning exercise in voice, and "Mother-Out-Law," a surprising family relationship that ends in a hilarious story about chest hair. The essays are formally inventive (even include recipes!) and mostly short but full of rich surprises. Reading them is like enjoying dinner at a friend's house—a friend who happens to be an amazing cook and keeps bringing out one delicious bite after another.
December 14, 2023
This book was so beautiful I found myself crying at times, not because it was necessarily sad, but because I was so moved by the author's words. What makes this more impressive is that I'm not super interested in food, I've never suffered depression, and I differ from the author in almost every way. But she brought me in and I feel like I learned a lot from reading this. Most importantly, something ignited within me, call it inspiration if you want, but almost everytime I set the book down, I picked up a pen and wrote out some thoughts of my own. Lovely, lovely book♥️
April 21, 2024
Sheila Squillante had me at the subtitle. Grief, love, and food pretty much defines my entire life. Moreover, because I know Sheila and (book reviewer’s disclaimer here) consider her a friend, I knew this memoir-in-essays would be a literary smorgasbord.
Spoiler: it is.
We share several commonalities, Sheila and me. We are children of the ‘80s, Gen Xers, both writers, both Pittsburgh transplants. My daughter attends the same university where Sheila directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.
And our dead fathers share the same birthday.
It changes you, losing a parent, but especially so when you—and they—are young and their passing is sudden and unexpected. Sheila’s dad was 46 when he died suddenly from a rare brain illness. Mine was 44 when a flu virus attacked his heart. Sheila was starting her senior year of college; I was a high school junior.
Such monumental loss and the residual grief that can surface even decades later is the focus of All Things Edible, Random, and Odd (CLASH Books, 2023), a title born from one of Sheila’s poems. Her essays capture the jarring sense of time that comes with the realization that your friends are the same age as your father when he died (“Meat Ragu”) and “that feeling of being disoriented and displaced by more than geography” when returning, years later, to a place you once visited together (“Bodies of Saltwater”). There’s Sheila’s “habit of counting up from 46 on my fingers, of looking into the faces of aging men and trying to find my father there. It feels wrong—voyeuristic and invasive, but the longing to know what he might have looked like at 50, 60, 70 compels me.”
There is the murkiness of memory in middle age of a father long gone.
“He fades in and out like an erratic radio transmission, mostly weak and far away, but sometimes sharp and clear and nearer to me than my own voice.”
(Nods head vigorously.)
Food serves as the catalyst for these sharp and clear recollections to take center stage because “between my father and me, food was a shared language that stood in for other, more explicit modes of affection.” In the standout essay “Dead Dad Day,” Sheila writes poignantly of her annual ritual on August 16, the last day of her father’s life.
“It is because I cannot remember my father without thinking about food, and it is because I cannot eat without remembering and missing him.”
“Turtle Soup” recalls how a road trip to visit potential colleges left Sheila “reeling with his insistence on all things edible, random and odd” — from trying a new soup to seeing quick glimpses of different side of her father.
(Another similarity: Sheila writes of her father’s out-of-character actions of intentionally swerving the car while driving to Creedance Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising.” An indelible, completely uncharacteristic memory of my dad is him at the wheel of his golden 1973 Pontiac LeMans, chauffeuring me to a friend’s house and spontaneously inching towards a red light by pumping the brakes to Kool and the Gang’s hit “Joanna,” a song I still cannot hear without smiling.)
That said, All Things Edible, Random, and Odd isn’t a saccharine collection devoted to romanticizing the deceased. (The emotion is palpable in “American Home Cookbook” as Sheila’s father chastises her mother during a dinner party because all the food is brown.) Rather, Sheila gives us a potluck, both stylistically and thematically. Some essays are written in recipe form— “Linguine with White Clam Sauce, serves four people on their way back from something hard” and “Chana Dal with Raita, serves six people at wit’s end.” Some essays don’t mention her father at all but serve as touchstones to his life, her loss, and the aftermath. Sheila poignantly captures an era of mixtapes, high school dances, first kisses, the awkwardness of teenager-dom and the first tentative steps toward adulthood with all its mistakes and heartbreak and subsequent losses that have a way of reminding you of the most significant one of all.
Of course, food features prominently in these essays, too. “Mother-Out-Law” juxtaposes Sheila’s memories of family dinners at a high school boyfriend’s house alongside her recollection of preparing an unforgettable Thanksgiving dinner at the same home, with the same people, many years later. The boyfriend is now an ex-husband; her new (and current) husband is in attendance, sleeping in said ex’s old bedroom with her. (“One friend suggested we get rich by writing a television pilot based on this one escapade alone.”)
As much as I wanted—and expected—to devour All Things Edible, Random and Odd in one bite, I found myself taking my time with these essays. In keeping with the gastronomic metaphors, it gave this reading experience a feeling of starting at a simmer then increasing to a satisfying boil. The ingredients in this collection are abundant: nostalgia, sadness, wistfulness, gratitude, understanding, humor, and whatever the word is for the sense one has of life coming full-circle, as it does when Sheila writes of her teenage son—who shares the same adventurous culinary spirit as the grandfather he never met—making turtle soup, the dish that bonded her and father together on that long-ago college trip.
“You know that loving anyone—however long they stay, whichever way they leave—means you take them with you. You take them in. It means you open yourself to grief—inconvenient, tender-green and tenuous. A delicate circle, always growing and alive.”
Spoiler: it is.
We share several commonalities, Sheila and me. We are children of the ‘80s, Gen Xers, both writers, both Pittsburgh transplants. My daughter attends the same university where Sheila directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.
And our dead fathers share the same birthday.
It changes you, losing a parent, but especially so when you—and they—are young and their passing is sudden and unexpected. Sheila’s dad was 46 when he died suddenly from a rare brain illness. Mine was 44 when a flu virus attacked his heart. Sheila was starting her senior year of college; I was a high school junior.
Such monumental loss and the residual grief that can surface even decades later is the focus of All Things Edible, Random, and Odd (CLASH Books, 2023), a title born from one of Sheila’s poems. Her essays capture the jarring sense of time that comes with the realization that your friends are the same age as your father when he died (“Meat Ragu”) and “that feeling of being disoriented and displaced by more than geography” when returning, years later, to a place you once visited together (“Bodies of Saltwater”). There’s Sheila’s “habit of counting up from 46 on my fingers, of looking into the faces of aging men and trying to find my father there. It feels wrong—voyeuristic and invasive, but the longing to know what he might have looked like at 50, 60, 70 compels me.”
There is the murkiness of memory in middle age of a father long gone.
“He fades in and out like an erratic radio transmission, mostly weak and far away, but sometimes sharp and clear and nearer to me than my own voice.”
(Nods head vigorously.)
Food serves as the catalyst for these sharp and clear recollections to take center stage because “between my father and me, food was a shared language that stood in for other, more explicit modes of affection.” In the standout essay “Dead Dad Day,” Sheila writes poignantly of her annual ritual on August 16, the last day of her father’s life.
“It is because I cannot remember my father without thinking about food, and it is because I cannot eat without remembering and missing him.”
“Turtle Soup” recalls how a road trip to visit potential colleges left Sheila “reeling with his insistence on all things edible, random and odd” — from trying a new soup to seeing quick glimpses of different side of her father.
(Another similarity: Sheila writes of her father’s out-of-character actions of intentionally swerving the car while driving to Creedance Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising.” An indelible, completely uncharacteristic memory of my dad is him at the wheel of his golden 1973 Pontiac LeMans, chauffeuring me to a friend’s house and spontaneously inching towards a red light by pumping the brakes to Kool and the Gang’s hit “Joanna,” a song I still cannot hear without smiling.)
That said, All Things Edible, Random, and Odd isn’t a saccharine collection devoted to romanticizing the deceased. (The emotion is palpable in “American Home Cookbook” as Sheila’s father chastises her mother during a dinner party because all the food is brown.) Rather, Sheila gives us a potluck, both stylistically and thematically. Some essays are written in recipe form— “Linguine with White Clam Sauce, serves four people on their way back from something hard” and “Chana Dal with Raita, serves six people at wit’s end.” Some essays don’t mention her father at all but serve as touchstones to his life, her loss, and the aftermath. Sheila poignantly captures an era of mixtapes, high school dances, first kisses, the awkwardness of teenager-dom and the first tentative steps toward adulthood with all its mistakes and heartbreak and subsequent losses that have a way of reminding you of the most significant one of all.
Of course, food features prominently in these essays, too. “Mother-Out-Law” juxtaposes Sheila’s memories of family dinners at a high school boyfriend’s house alongside her recollection of preparing an unforgettable Thanksgiving dinner at the same home, with the same people, many years later. The boyfriend is now an ex-husband; her new (and current) husband is in attendance, sleeping in said ex’s old bedroom with her. (“One friend suggested we get rich by writing a television pilot based on this one escapade alone.”)
As much as I wanted—and expected—to devour All Things Edible, Random and Odd in one bite, I found myself taking my time with these essays. In keeping with the gastronomic metaphors, it gave this reading experience a feeling of starting at a simmer then increasing to a satisfying boil. The ingredients in this collection are abundant: nostalgia, sadness, wistfulness, gratitude, understanding, humor, and whatever the word is for the sense one has of life coming full-circle, as it does when Sheila writes of her teenage son—who shares the same adventurous culinary spirit as the grandfather he never met—making turtle soup, the dish that bonded her and father together on that long-ago college trip.
“You know that loving anyone—however long they stay, whichever way they leave—means you take them with you. You take them in. It means you open yourself to grief—inconvenient, tender-green and tenuous. A delicate circle, always growing and alive.”
March 20, 2024
I had to sit with this for a while.... I picked this up knowing it was a book on grief, and specifically the grief of losing a father. What I didn't know was how much Squillante's story parallels my own. Both of our Dad's died the summer before our senior year of college. That struck me right away, in all my thinking about my grief I often feel like my family is the only one who have ever experienced something like this. That I'm the only 21 year old who lost their Dad. While circumstances were different, it gives me so much hope to see that Squillante is able to be happy and live a great life despite the loss she experienced. It is so important to keep the name of your lost loved one on your lips and to write such a beautiful tribute is even better. Right now the essays that connected with me the most were those on grief, but I will be rereading this many times and I have a feeling as my life progresses I will connect with different aspects. So great.
February 20, 2024
This was a very pretty collection of essays about womanhood, grief, and food. I read it through from front to back, which wasn’t necessarily the best way to approach a collection of essays. Still, this order also made this feel like a new type of coming-of-age story about a young woman becoming a woman from ages 21 to 40’s.
December 4, 2024
This is a beautiful collection that feels both light-hearted and deeply touching. By the time you're finished, you genuinely feel as though you've been sitting in the author's kitchen, talking and listening and tasting. It's such a comfortable read, in the deep-in-my-heart sense. Couldn't love it more.
April 18, 2024
forgot to put my review for this here, but looooved this one. always describe this to people as the feisty older sister to crying in h mart, and it works!
May 20, 2025
The first half is so rich in stunning, sensory food writing. I only wish the flavor-filled words had carried through to the end.
January 16, 2024
A collection of pure joy! A celebration of family, food, and memories. Some of the best and most creative essays I've had the pleasure of reading and a must read. Love this author.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews