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Cooking Tips for Desperate Fishwives: An Island Memoir
Part love story, part survival story, part meditation on family dysfunction, this offbeat memoir chronicles the unpredictable life of a young wife and mother on Gabriola Island. In 1989, twenty-three-year-old Margot Fedoruk left Winnipeg and her volatile Slavic-Jewish family for the wilds of BC to work as a tree planter and to contemplate her mother’s untimely death from cancer. There, she met Rick Corless, a burly, red-headed sea urchin diver, and soon found herself pregnant and cooking vegetarian meals for meat-eating divers on Rick’s boat, The Buckaroo , as they travelled along the rugged northern BC coastline. Eventually, the unlikely couple settled on Gabriola Island to raise two girls, dig for clams, keep chickens, clean houses, and make soap to sell at the local market. As she washed windows with stunning ocean views, Margot also wiped away lonely tears, determined not to repeat the same mistakes as she had witnessed during her parents’ marriage made in hell. Through dark humour, vivid descriptions, and quirky characters, Margot’s reflections on marriage, motherhood, isolation, food, and family paint an unforgettable portrait of a modern-day fishwife left behind to keep the home fires burning. True to its title, Cooking Tips for Desperate Fishwives is a memoir infused with recipes, from the hearty Eastern European fare of Margot’s childhood to more adventurous coastal BC cuisine.
256 pages, Paperback
Published October 18, 2022
3 people are currently reading
85 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
October 7, 2022
There's something VERY daunting about being the first to leave a book review.
When the publisher asked if I would be interested in reviewing Cooking Tips For Desperate Fishwives, I was immediately drawn into the cover. It's SO unique, and the artwork is beautiful! Plus, who wouldn't be interested based on the title? I was really intrigued.
Initial thoughts when I started reading were excitement. The author is living in downtown Victoria on page one. There's always that feeling of connectivity when discovering a familiar place in a book.
I thoroughly enjoyed Margot's story. It's one of sacrifice, resilience, and an unbelievable amount of love. Heartbreaking at times but there's also so much beauty.
The recipes throughout the book were such a fabulous touch. So many that I plan on giving a go!
Memoirs are one of my most favorite genres! I am forever in awe of those who share their personal stories with the world. If you have a love of memoirs too, I highly recommend picking this book up.
Huge thank you to Heritage House Publishing for my gifted copy!
When the publisher asked if I would be interested in reviewing Cooking Tips For Desperate Fishwives, I was immediately drawn into the cover. It's SO unique, and the artwork is beautiful! Plus, who wouldn't be interested based on the title? I was really intrigued.
Initial thoughts when I started reading were excitement. The author is living in downtown Victoria on page one. There's always that feeling of connectivity when discovering a familiar place in a book.
I thoroughly enjoyed Margot's story. It's one of sacrifice, resilience, and an unbelievable amount of love. Heartbreaking at times but there's also so much beauty.
The recipes throughout the book were such a fabulous touch. So many that I plan on giving a go!
Memoirs are one of my most favorite genres! I am forever in awe of those who share their personal stories with the world. If you have a love of memoirs too, I highly recommend picking this book up.
Huge thank you to Heritage House Publishing for my gifted copy!
March 30, 2025
Enjoyed these stories from a prairie girl finding her life on the west coast.
January 31, 2023
|| COOKING TIPS FOR DESPERATE FISHWIVES ||
#gifted/@heritagehousepublishing
•
✍🏻
A heartfelt memoir of love, loss, family, motherhood, wifehood and food.
Have you ever visited one of those small town farmers type markets where there's a stand of homemade soaps, usually a woman is selling them. Whenever I see this woman selling her homemade soaps I wonder about what her life has been like. What brought her to making her own soaps and selling them. Because the hippie in me has tried soap making and it is not as easy as you'd think. Tips For Desperate Fishwives was a window into that life I have wondered about. A story of a Canadian prairie girl with a wild heart who comes to British Columbia in search of freedom and bigger things, falling in love and becoming a sea urchin divers wife, a mother, a woman of resilience and strength. This story is filled with humor, beauty and honesty. I really enjoyed this book, and the recipe's throughout were such a fun bonus!
For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong
#gifted/@heritagehousepublishing
•
✍🏻
A heartfelt memoir of love, loss, family, motherhood, wifehood and food.
Have you ever visited one of those small town farmers type markets where there's a stand of homemade soaps, usually a woman is selling them. Whenever I see this woman selling her homemade soaps I wonder about what her life has been like. What brought her to making her own soaps and selling them. Because the hippie in me has tried soap making and it is not as easy as you'd think. Tips For Desperate Fishwives was a window into that life I have wondered about. A story of a Canadian prairie girl with a wild heart who comes to British Columbia in search of freedom and bigger things, falling in love and becoming a sea urchin divers wife, a mother, a woman of resilience and strength. This story is filled with humor, beauty and honesty. I really enjoyed this book, and the recipe's throughout were such a fun bonus!
For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong
December 17, 2022
If you've spent time on Vancouver Island or the Sunshine Coast, you'll probably enjoy this book. If you've ever wondered about the hippies selling soap at the market, you'll enjoy this book. And man it will make you hungry! It will definitely make you glad you didn't marry a fisherman!
January 8, 2023
Not all memoirs need to be SO dramatic and heart wrenching. This story certainly has ups and downs like all lives but overall it is a simple and very well written memoir. It's Canadiana and west coast themes elevate it for me.
November 13, 2022
I loved this book. It's a heartfelt story of adventure, family, loss, love and life. It's entertaining and very interesting, and it has an undercurrent of profound observations that were quite thought provoking. The language is often beautiful and poetic. There were many times I laughed out loud, and I was also moved to tears on occasion. The author is relatable, even while she tells the story of an unusual life. There's something reassuring about reading a candid, honest narrative about a person's struggles, and inspiring to read how they find joy and beauty along the way. The recipes sound amazing, but they are more than just recipes - they lend cultural and familial context to the story, and make the reader feel as though they are a friend who has been invited into the author's confidence. The reader feels drawn into the community that would share these recipes. Ultimately, this is a story about being human, and resilience. I highly recommend it. (P.S. I also love the cover.)
May 13, 2023
I loved this book. I have so much admiration for people who live these kinds of lives. The wild, surviving, hardworking people with grit.
“Inside I am still the same young girl who fled out west to work in the mountains after my mothers funeral. I stood, face in the wind, planting bags hanging heavy with seedlings from my hips, eager for my life of adventures to begin, unaware that one day there would be small children clinging to those same (wider) hips. Instead of hacking through piles of slash and burn, I was now wading through piles of mismatched socks, damp towels, and pet fur.”
“Inside I am still the same young girl who fled out west to work in the mountains after my mothers funeral. I stood, face in the wind, planting bags hanging heavy with seedlings from my hips, eager for my life of adventures to begin, unaware that one day there would be small children clinging to those same (wider) hips. Instead of hacking through piles of slash and burn, I was now wading through piles of mismatched socks, damp towels, and pet fur.”
March 2, 2023
I just couldn’t get in to this book so I didn’t finish it. Maybe if I persevered it would have got more interesting.
November 15, 2023
I loved this book. I felt both empathy towards the main character and anger. I felt for her, raising her kids as what felt like, through her narrative anyway, a single parent. I wondered why such a smart, talented person had gotten caught in that old trope of “housewife” or “fishwife” as she calls it.
November 25, 2022
This memoir is delightful, and the author shares with the reader her roller coaster ride through life, making a home on the gulf Islands and feeling the tug of wild things and the sea. The sea draws her not only to her Island home, but also to the man she would eventually marry. There is wonderful humor in this book, as well as tree planting adventures, soapmaking, and it really immerses the reader in West Coast life- the real west coast life where nature rules, and she prays the man she loves will be safe as he heads out onto the ocean to dive and make a living. She ponders her relationship with her parents, her heritage and her family, and looks inward to find her place in the world and overcome fears and push herself outside her comfort zone as she raises her children and weathers the ups and downs of life.
September 12, 2024
I'm going to be honest, this book is pretty bad. (**Spoilers ahead**)
When I saw it sitting in a tourist gift shop in Prince Rupert, with its pretty cover and interesting description, I thought, "Why not? I'm on a trip, it might be nice to learn about living in a coastal town, from someone who lived here." My assumptions about its contents were incorrect. I thought I was buying a book about ocean food, life in a coastal town, and, given where I was buying this book, Prince Rupert. I feel I was let down on all counts (although on the last point, I can't blame the author, it was my own mistake). After I was midway through the memoir, I read a review about this book, which mentioned that it seemed to not belong to any genre very well. It isn't a book about food, although it does have recipes in it. It isn't a great memoir, and it doesn't really feel like a love story.
Margot's book feels like a creative writing and therapeutic exercise rolled into one. It is raw, full of her anxieties, frustrations, and flaws. Her life is a hard one, from growing up with an alcoholic dad, and a mother who keeps choosing the wrong men, to her life as a "fishwife", with an absent husband who seems to leave her to fend for herself for 6+ months of every year. This memoir reads like a journal more than anything, where she pours out her frustrations about her choices on the unsuspecting reader.
As I read this book, all I could think about was how this is a story of two people who love each other, but are incompatible. It is about the push and pull of a relationship that is uncomprimising. I found myself hoping that she would move her family from Gabriola Island (one of their primary home bases) to Prince Rupert, where Rick seemed to spend much of his time. But they didn't. So instead, I read through 243 pages of her whining about her life.
Don't get me wrong, Margot is a very strong woman. She managed to raise two girls mostly by herself, had a soapmaking business, cleaned homes around the island, was a librarian (sort of), and had numerous other odd jobs to make ends meet. However, this story felt very narcissistic and self-centered. It felt like she was looking for validation for her own, self-inflicted martyrdom. I found it hard to relate to anyone outside herself, except Kathy who once told Margot "You are a very demanding friend". I feel for you, Kathy. I barely know anyone from her story, not even her husband, Rick, because so much of the book is spent talking about how Margot was feeling, what she was thinking. I'm not sure, but I think she may also have been an alcoholic. My boyfriend ended up reading some of it out loud after I was complaining so much, and said that they seem like the messy neighbors who just can't keep it together. This excerpt is what prompted his statement,
"Once we were interupted by some Jehovah's Witness canvassers, who knocked on our beautiful barnwood door. I tiptoed naked to peer out the window to see two people retreating down the looping gravel, looking over piles of unused shoes curling with spider webs and dead flies around the window sill, unkempt piles of empty Stella Artois bottles and empty wine boxes."
I think that with a better editor, this could have been a better book. It would have helped if someone had reigned in Margot on her constant stream-of-conciousness dialogue. There were some parts of the book where her descriptions were good, where I was actually able to start to feel immersed in the setting, but then her complaining came up again and shattered the illusion. She also has a bad habit of starting a story, only to not finish it. The story jumps around a lot as well, so it feels very disorganized (again, like reading a bunch of journal entries rather than a book) I only finished it so I could write a review with full knowledge of the way it ends. She stays with Rick, and from what I can tell, she stays miserable. I honestly don't know why she stayed, even after almost 30 years of being together. She loves him, and he loves her, but does that make up for the fact that she is obviously depressed and unhappy for most of her life? This book feels like a case study on inter-generational trauma, more than anything. This was not the story that the back cover led me to believe it would be, and I'm irritated that I spent $27 on it. I might put it to better use and use it to start a campfire.
When I saw it sitting in a tourist gift shop in Prince Rupert, with its pretty cover and interesting description, I thought, "Why not? I'm on a trip, it might be nice to learn about living in a coastal town, from someone who lived here." My assumptions about its contents were incorrect. I thought I was buying a book about ocean food, life in a coastal town, and, given where I was buying this book, Prince Rupert. I feel I was let down on all counts (although on the last point, I can't blame the author, it was my own mistake). After I was midway through the memoir, I read a review about this book, which mentioned that it seemed to not belong to any genre very well. It isn't a book about food, although it does have recipes in it. It isn't a great memoir, and it doesn't really feel like a love story.
Margot's book feels like a creative writing and therapeutic exercise rolled into one. It is raw, full of her anxieties, frustrations, and flaws. Her life is a hard one, from growing up with an alcoholic dad, and a mother who keeps choosing the wrong men, to her life as a "fishwife", with an absent husband who seems to leave her to fend for herself for 6+ months of every year. This memoir reads like a journal more than anything, where she pours out her frustrations about her choices on the unsuspecting reader.
As I read this book, all I could think about was how this is a story of two people who love each other, but are incompatible. It is about the push and pull of a relationship that is uncomprimising. I found myself hoping that she would move her family from Gabriola Island (one of their primary home bases) to Prince Rupert, where Rick seemed to spend much of his time. But they didn't. So instead, I read through 243 pages of her whining about her life.
Don't get me wrong, Margot is a very strong woman. She managed to raise two girls mostly by herself, had a soapmaking business, cleaned homes around the island, was a librarian (sort of), and had numerous other odd jobs to make ends meet. However, this story felt very narcissistic and self-centered. It felt like she was looking for validation for her own, self-inflicted martyrdom. I found it hard to relate to anyone outside herself, except Kathy who once told Margot "You are a very demanding friend". I feel for you, Kathy. I barely know anyone from her story, not even her husband, Rick, because so much of the book is spent talking about how Margot was feeling, what she was thinking. I'm not sure, but I think she may also have been an alcoholic. My boyfriend ended up reading some of it out loud after I was complaining so much, and said that they seem like the messy neighbors who just can't keep it together. This excerpt is what prompted his statement,
"Once we were interupted by some Jehovah's Witness canvassers, who knocked on our beautiful barnwood door. I tiptoed naked to peer out the window to see two people retreating down the looping gravel, looking over piles of unused shoes curling with spider webs and dead flies around the window sill, unkempt piles of empty Stella Artois bottles and empty wine boxes."
I think that with a better editor, this could have been a better book. It would have helped if someone had reigned in Margot on her constant stream-of-conciousness dialogue. There were some parts of the book where her descriptions were good, where I was actually able to start to feel immersed in the setting, but then her complaining came up again and shattered the illusion. She also has a bad habit of starting a story, only to not finish it. The story jumps around a lot as well, so it feels very disorganized (again, like reading a bunch of journal entries rather than a book) I only finished it so I could write a review with full knowledge of the way it ends. She stays with Rick, and from what I can tell, she stays miserable. I honestly don't know why she stayed, even after almost 30 years of being together. She loves him, and he loves her, but does that make up for the fact that she is obviously depressed and unhappy for most of her life? This book feels like a case study on inter-generational trauma, more than anything. This was not the story that the back cover led me to believe it would be, and I'm irritated that I spent $27 on it. I might put it to better use and use it to start a campfire.
February 27, 2023
I loved this book! I sat down to start it and didn’t get up again until page 80. Fedoruk is funny and so engagingly open and honest about her relationship and then marriage to a sea urchin diver who is often gone for weeks at a time. With humour, lots of hard work, and a few supportive friends, Fedoruk ultimately creates a wonderful life for her family on an island with extremely limited resources. The recipes are excellent and I have followed her advice about getting through the long dark winter evenings by cooking up a storm!
December 29, 2022
Cooking Tips for Desperate Fishwives is an engaging story of family life with its challenges and tough times, on a small Canadian island. The story is both tender and quirky, funny and fearless as Margo forges on, determined to find her way in this endearing and enduring love story. The recipes are a great addition to this well-told tale.
June 10, 2023
Having lived in Victoria, and being of a similar vintage as the author, I enjoyed this memoir which so clearly evoked a sense of nostalgia for me.
Looking forward to trying out some of the recipes.
Looking forward to trying out some of the recipes.
July 28, 2023
A great read about the author's unusual life on the coast. The world she lives in is often challenging and not always happy, but it is filled with love and delicious food.
September 24, 2023
An easy to follow non fiction tale about living on the coast and the trials and tribulations it entails. I wish it wrapped up in more of a full circle way but can’t win them all.
December 5, 2024
I found the rambling writing style distracting.
April 8, 2025
As an island girl with an island girl soul, I really enjoyed this memoir.
April 19, 2023
I enjoyed the back story of her childhood but man, did I get sick of all the part time jobs she took to continue her codependent relationship with a mostly absent drunken sailor. Not going to finish it.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews