Nonfiction Reader Challenge: Savor

When I picked Savor as my book for the “Food” category of the Nonfiction Reader challenge, I thought I’d be reading mostly about food. I knew the author, a talented young chef, died far too early, but somehow I thought that before that point, the focus would be on more cheerful and tasty things.

I was wrong. Yes, this is a book with some fantastic descriptions of food, and of one woman’s journey toward becoming a great chef, but it’s much more a book about love and death and family and trauma and healing. It’s about the quandary of being caught between two cultures, wanting to bring them together in a great feast of celebration, while knowing well how violent are the forces of opposition. It’s about the excruciating pain of being betrayed by the people who should have been protecting you, and of loving people who don’t want you to be who you really are. It’s about ignoring things you don’t want to see, until it’s too late, and dealing with the consequences. It’s about the callous cruelty of our modern medical system, and about the human connections that can still heal in the midst of evil conditions. And in the end, it’s about going through the dark night of the soul, feeling abandoned by God, and the spiritual awakening to divine love, which enables us to forgive and be forgiven, trusting in whatever may come after the apparent end of life.

Not quite what I expected, but I felt humbled by Fatima’s courage, vulnerability, and honesty in sharing her story. She had wanted to write a different kind of book, one about traveling the world in her last year of life and sampling all the incredible food she had not yet tasted, but her illness derailed that dream. Instead, she typed and dictated her story for another writer to assemble, incorporating articles she’d written for Bon Appetit on learning her diagnosis. The two worked together for just one week before Fatima’s death. Her mother (who should really be credited as a co-author) then filled in more of the history from her point of view. This required courage and vulnerability on her part, as well, and although it was sometimes a bit jarring, and I wished for more of Fatima’s dynamic, authentic voice, the collaborative effort gives another flavor to the project — in some ways more fitting than if Fatima had been able to write it all herself. No one survives alone, no one is alone, even in death. The creation of our lives takes place in relationship, as cooking is also a creative engagement with many elements in relationship with each other.

So many things in Fatima’s story went against the expectations of her Pakistani heritage, and her mother and her family had to struggle toward acceptance, sometimes causing her and each other even greater pain. It was not usual for a woman to want to become a chef, a restaurant owner, a TV personality. It was not acceptable to resist the expectation of conventional marriage with a Pakistani man, still less to openly embrace romantic relationships with people of any gender. It was taboo for girls to speak up about experiencing sexual abuse. She did most of those things, and many more, a living challenge to the voices saying “you can’t do that.” And those around her were changed by the encounter, in ways that will continue to reverberate, her legacy living on.

Fatima had huge dreams about helping the hungry, supporting people marginalized by gender and culture, changing the image of Pakistan, sharing the food she loved. She didn’t get to do those things in the way she’d expected, but she did create this book. I think she has done her part in changing the world, by being herself, by speaking up, embracing life and entering death with a whole heart. Any of us can only aspire to do the same.

Fatima Ali, with Farezeh Durrani and Tarajia Morrell, Savor: A Chef’s Hunger for More (Ballantine, 2022)

Read for the Nonfiction Reader Challenge — Food category