Selecting the right kind of biography

These days more and more not-so-famous men and women from all over the world are sharing life experiences with us in their memoirs or biographies. The best of these books evoke a time and place that is filled with the magic of nostalgia and succeed in bringing to life the unique even eccentric characters that abound in many families and strike a chord of recognition in our own memories.

I first discovered this genre of intimate half recipe-half anecdote or part-narrative part-cookbook memoir with Elizabeth Luards' "Family Life, Birth, Death and the Whole Damn Thing" (pub: Corgi Books 1996). Ms. Luard is a prize winning food writer, novelist and natural history artist and now a full time writer. She says in the introduction that "This book is no self improvement manual. It is simply one woman's account of how one family, shaped by time, place and social habits, coped with the business of reaching adulthood."

It is of course considerably more than that because Ms. Luard "a daughter of the Sixties... a one-time part-time flower child" was a part of the young set in London that included many who became the pop idols of their generation.

Her husband Nicholas was co-editor of Private Eye the iconoclastic magazine of that era and with his friend Peter Cook, the great comedy writer and dramatist (remember Beyond the Fringe and Oh Calcutta), was involved in many other ventures in the music and pop scene of that heady era.

The extent of their social ambit becomes apparent in the anecdotes about their life in London. For instance when organising a concert for Amnesty International, they asked their good friends the Beatles to play but since the group was already engaged elsewhere they recommended "this new pop group who are not so bad -- The Rolling Stones"! As she observes "No one had yet become too famous to speak to anyone else". So the pages abound with interesting stories about Larry Olivier and John Osborne, Cat Stevens and Pink Floyd, Michael Hasting, Barry Humphries, Gerald Scarfe and the inimitable Mary Quant who changed the look of an entire generation.

That was the milieu and the only unusual aspect was that the author did not "do drugs" and the "singles scene" but had a healthy family life with four children and a large convivial circle of friends. The Luards eventually went off to live in a remote village in Andalusia and the best part of the book is the description of the food markets and restaurants of southern Spain as well as the mouth watering recipes that the author cooked up.

Although this tenderly, even passionately written memoir is redolent with the images of good friends, colourful festivals and delicious meals, nevertheless the closing chapters are poignant and painful because the family had to face the loss of a beloved eldest daughter, Francesca who tested positive for the HIV virus and shortly before Christmas 1994 died of AIDS related cancer. The final three chapters not only describe the family's response to the illness but also contain Francesca's own eloquent, humane and all too brief account of the illness.

This journey through life from early marriage to maturity, from the dizzy days of the early Sixties to thoughtful middle-age, of a woman who has been a full-time and devoted mother and who is now a professional writer and painter, full of courage, tenacity and imagination is one of the most moving books I have ever read.

In the same genre is Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone, Growing Up at the Table, (pub: Broadway Books 1998) and Comfort Me With Applies, (pub: Random House 2001) are similar in some respects since the author is a well-known food writer and columnist but grew up in a Jewish family in New York. At a very early age Reichl discovered that "food could be a way of making sense of the world ... If you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were."

With an acute sense of observation, she describes a life determined, enhanced and defined in equal measure by a passion for food, unforgettable people and the love of tales well told. From her childhood experiences, when the young Ruth desperately tried to steer her manic mothers' cooking towards something edible for the frequent guests at their home, to later years we meet the characters who shaped her tastes and dominated her world -- her long association with the fascinating gourmand Monsieur du Croix who served Reichl her first soufflé to those at her politically correct table in Berkeley who championed the organic food revolution in the 1970s. Spiced with her infectious humour and sprinkled with her favourite recipes this is a witty and compelling chronicle of a culinary sensualist's coming of age.

From the South Asian Diaspora comes the elegantly crafted "Monsoon Diary, A Memoir With Recipes" by Shobha Narayan (pub: Villard Books, New York 2003). This account of a South Indian childhood peopled with the eccentric characters of a small town and an extended family delights with its illuminating look at culture and food. The unusual vegetarian recipes are matched by stories as varied as Asian spices and the mouth watering descriptions of meals consumed in the backdrop of quirky customs and solemn rituals that surround the daily lives of so many South Asians whether they live at home or in the alien setting of the west.

Many of the characters of Ms Narayan's childhood will strike a chord in our own memories of growing up. There is Raju the milkman who named his cows after his wives, the dhobi who daily sets up his ironing stand in their front yard and picked up red hot coals with his bare hands and of course the aunts, uncles and grand parents with their individual quirks and good or bad humours.

This is a delightful book and one which takes me to the subject of yet-to-be-written books. When will be get a book of food memoirs in English by a Bangladeshi writer that is as delicate and enjoyable as these?