Erin French grew up in rural Maine, in the outdoors and in her father's diner, where she began helping out in the kitchen at age 12. After a few years at college, she returned home to Maine, and faced challenges including young single motherhood; a difficult marriage and more difficult divorce; opening and then losing her first small restaurant; addiction and recovery. Eventually French moved back to her hometown of Freedom, where she would start again with her wildly successful The Lost Kitchen. These travels, pitfalls and victories she recounts in Finding Freedom: A Cook's Story; Remaking a Life from Scratch. Renovation and redemption--of spaces and of herself--are central to her story.

This memoir begins mid-scene, with the nine-months-pregnant narrator, age 21, on break from a 16-hour shift at the family diner. The opening showcases the detailed, richly sensory food writing that permeates these pages, then flashes back, to describe French first entering the diner at age five; observing her father's love for his work, his drinking and his limited ability to show love for his family; working in the kitchen and dreaming of escape. Finding Freedom centers around food, from childhood in the diner to young motherhood, when French supported herself with a small business baking cakes, cookies and pies, working retail in a cooking supply store and for a catering company. French picks up skills and ideas along the way and builds confidence until she is able to open a supper club and then the first The Lost Kitchen on the Maine coast. By this time, she has also picked up a husband, Tom, who turns out to be a heavy drinker, controlling and eventually abusive. From her problems with depression and anxiety, and the excruciating hard work and long days of restaurant work, she picks up prescriptions for Xanax, Ambien, Klonopin and more. This chapter of French's story ends in rehab, with Tom seizing custody of her child and shuttering The Lost Kitchen, including "every whisk, every spoon, every spatula, and knife."

But the cook (French resists the title "chef," having no culinary degree or formal training) is scrappy, hard-working and resourceful. She adopts a dog, moves into a cabin without electricity or running water, fights for custody of her son and gets back into the kitchen. She first converts a dilapidated Airstream into a food truck for roving outdoor fine dining events on farms, in orchards and fields. And then another opportunity shows itself: the old mill in Freedom is finally gutted and renovated into the perfect, romantic setting for a small but picturesque dining room. The Lost Kitchen is reborn. Within a few short seasons, its limited reservations must be filled by postal lottery, more than 20,000 postcards "pouring in as though it were the North Pole."

The spaces French occupies are lovingly built and restored. The first The Lost Kitchen is housed in a former bank building, a three-story gothic flatiron she describes in tender, glowing terms: "One by one I folded back the old wooden shutters and flung open the tall windows, letting light into spaces that had been dark for so long.... The place was dripping with character, with its hardwood floors, high ceilings, thick period molding, and doors with frosted glass and heavy hardware." Its owners choose to take a chance on renting to French after a personal meeting and homemade meal. This process repeats with The Lost Kitchen's reincarnation in Freedom: "The quiet rumors had been spreading around town about the old mill's restoration, the same way they had about me." In between, French must clean out and redecorate the cabin she lives in post-rehab on her parents' land, and the Airstream trailer she uses to get on her cooking feet again. As the book closes, she has just purchased an old fixer-upper farmhouse "the color of strawberries."

French excels in describing her passion for cooking and for pleasing people via food; she's at her best detailing the foods themselves, and her mouth-watering writing is the heart of this memoir: "Hard-boiled quail eggs as bar snacks that you could peel-n-eat and dunk in a dust of celery salt." "Fresh-from-the-fryer nutmeg-laced doughnuts." "Fried chicken. Served cold, crispy, and juicy.... We could just hold it up in the air as the boat screamed through the waves to catch a bit of salty breeze before devouring it to the bone."

Cooking and baking, flower arranging, the fine art of plating and the writing of this memoir contribute to a profile of a woman driven to create beauty even out of pain. The narrator's voice is vulnerable, her trauma is real and visceral but, by the end, this is a delicious, feel-good redemption tale. --Julia Kastner

(photo: Erin Little)

Erin French is the owner and chef of The Lost Kitchen, a 40-seat restaurant in Freedom, Maine, that was named one of Time magazine's World's Greatest Places and one of "12 Restaurants Worth Traveling Across the World to Experience" by Bloomberg. Born and raised in Maine, French loves sharing her home region and its delicious heritage. French's The Lost Kitchen Cookbook was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award. Her memoir, Finding Freedom: A Cook's Story; Remaking a Life from Scratch, will be published by Celadon in April 2021.

How are the creative pursuits of cooking and writing similar, and different?

There were many times when writing this book that I told myself to bring it back to what I know. When I create a dish, I always take myself there in my mind, to taste it, to smell it, to think about every detail and how the dish makes me feel before I even make it, and long before I write it into a menu. I took my moments in the kitchen and used them to help me shape this book. I took time to think and go deep in my mind to taste all the details before I wrote them down on the page. Sometimes, to keep myself from getting overwhelmed, I tried to think of each chapter as a dish, that would eventually make up an entire menu. Bit by bit, ingredient by ingredient. The big difference? No dishes to wash!

When and how did you know you needed to write this book?

One of my editors once told me, "Your next book is always the one you feel burning inside of you." Although I think my agent was baffled when I told her that I wasn't pitching her another cookbook! I started to feel this one burning inside of me and knew I had to tell it. I knew I needed to reprocess my story to avoid burying it and to understand how it shaped my life. I also knew that in so many moments of my darkness I felt so utterly alone, and I hoped that if I shared this story maybe it would help others who experience their own moments of hell see the hope for getting through it and the beauty that can prevail.

Was it cathartic?

It was challenging going back to these dark days in such depth, but it empowered me that much more to live through them a second time. There were some unsettled moments that I finally put to rest through writing this book. It was the best therapy session with myself I've ever had.

You've shared so much of yourself in these pages. Do you hold anything back? How do you navigate the sharing of personal detail and trauma?

I poured it all out in the pages of this book. How do you tell your story of struggles to triumph without sharing the most vulnerable, darkest details of your days? I made one rule for myself while writing this: if it's not my story, it's not mine to tell. There are people in my life who have hurt me, and through it I recognized things they had been through in their own lives, reasons that shaped them into the person they became and maybe made them behave the way they did. But that's their story to tell, not mine.

What are you cooking this week?

While the restaurant is closed, I'm cooking lots at home. Our freezer is stocked for winter and my dry goods pantry is ready for a winter at home. This week's favorites were curried lentil soup while sitting in front of the fire; lamb chops marinated with rosemary and garlic; roasted squash with apples and maple syrup; and a classic apple crisp with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream!

What are you working on next?

Covid has me multitasking like a crazy woman right now. Adapting to our new world and trying to keep the restaurant alive keeps me moving. I'm neck deep in a construction project, building out individual private dining cabins in the woods here at the mill in Freedom, and simultaneously renovating my Airstream, which will serve as the mobile kitchen to serve the cabins. I'm also building out our first ever online makers market, which we are filling with beautiful Maine-made goods for the holidays. Oh! And planning for next season's series of outdoor dinners we will be holding. --Julia Kastner