Finding Freedom by Erin French

I started my spouse down the road of chef memoir's and as can happen with such a push, the timing was just right, and he has taken off like a house afire on this quest. En route to whatever his destination ends up being, he listened to this and thought I should too. The author's journey to having a destination restaurant was improbable at best. She starts off life as a girl roaming barefoot on a 25-acre farm in Freedom, Maine. Her father buys a diner that the family largely runs single-handedly, serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner, working 16 hour days to keep it afloat. As a teenager she falls in love with food while working the line at the same said diner. Her father is an abusive, often cruel, alcoholic who offers nothing in the way of nurturance other than a roof over her head. Her mother would have benefitted from some visits to Al-Anon, but in the absence of that, helps her daughter in the most non-confrontational of ways, and there are the usual stumbles along the way that happen when a child from a working poor family attempts to escape their origin story. So she doesn't escape--she has many stumbles along the way, including an unplanned pregnancy, dropping out of college, a marriage to a much older man who cannot stand her success, an addiction to pills and booze, and a divorce that was if anything more abusive than the marriage. Instead she stays, and she works hard, and she makes the most of her innate skills and those that she learns along the way, and she builds a homemade life for herself. So there you have it, a chef road not often taken.