After graduating from college with two majors from a liberal arts college, I had almost no idea what I wanted to do to earn a living. I had bought into the liberal arts ideal of following my interests, and done so perhaps a little too whole-heartedly, with no thought to the future. One of the career paths I briefly considered was chef. I had, after all, developed a love of cooking and baking over the previous four years, particularly the summers at home where I missed the rather good food of college life. Going to culinary school and all that, however, became a road not taken for me, which is probably just as well--I'm almost certainly happier with my dabbling. 
 All that is shared by way of explanation for why I picked up this book. I didn't have many expectations going in, not knowing anything about Hamilton or her experiences. All I knew was that the book was about cooking somehow and that it was available as an audio book from my local library. Good enough! 
 And it was, in fact, good enough. It held my attention and I enjoyed the ride that Hamilton took me on, from her rebellious and edgy young life more or less raising herself through trial and error in her teenage years through her twenties spent in what sounds like a perfectly awful sort of cooking for mass-producing catering companies, into later life with her own restaurant and her culinary experiences with her husband's Italian family. Often, it was hard to know quite where she was going, and Hamilton is clearly unconventional in numerous ways--for my part, I found those elements of self-revelation to be what made her interesting and the book worth reading.