A former "New Yorker" editor chronicles her quest to overcome the convergence of the sudden loss of her brother, being dumped by her fiancé, and being evicted from her apartment by cooking her way across the country while staying with friends and family.

"There's no real logic to where we start out and what we end up with. It's like cooking. Once you get your ingredients, how you put them together at any given time is up to you: it's your responsibility to create something good. ... It helps to have a high tolerance for disasters, in the kitchen or otherwise. One life-changing night, reeling from her beloved brother's sudden death, a devastating breakup with her handsome engineer fiancé, and eviction from the apartment they shared, Emily Nunn had lost all sense of family, home, and financial security. After a few glasses of wine, heartbroken and unmoored, Emily--an avid cook and professional food writer--decided to pour her heart out on Facebook. The next morning, she woke up with an awful hangover and a feeling she'd made a terrible mistake--only to discover she had more friends than she knew, many of whom invited her to come visit and cook with them as she put her life back together. Thus began the Comfort Food Tour. Searching for a way forward, Emily travels the country, cooking and staying with family and friends. She also travels back home to revisit scenes from her dysfunctional Southern upbringing, dominated by her dramatic, unpredictable mother and her silent, disengaged father. Her wonderfully idiosyncratic relatives come alive in these pages, all part of the rich Southern story in which past and present are indistinguishable, food is a source of connection and identity, and a good story is often preferred to a not-so-pleasant truth. But truth, pleasant or not, is what Emily Nunn craves, and with it comes an acceptance of the losses she has endured, and a sense of hope for the future. In the salty snap of a single Virginia ham biscuit and the sour tang of Great-grandmother's Mean Lemon Cake, she experiences the healing power of comfort food--and serves up dozens of recipes for the wonderful dishes that saved her life. With biting humor and luminous prose, Emily Nunn delivers a moving account of her descent into darkness and her hard-won return to the living."--Jacket.