BOOKSHOP.ORG BEST OF NONFICTION 2024
A spirited and timely exploration of group living that encourages readers to reconsider the meaning of family and home.
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“Milholland celebrates communal living in this nourishing, cleareyed memoir, recounting years of conversation and shared meals.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Part memoir and part cookbook, Group Living and Other Recipes explores how the writer’s eccentric upbringing led her to seek community through food . . . with humor and empathy.”—TIME
“An inspiring account of how and why to live a principled life.”—People
“Reading this book is like finding a friend. With intelligence and humor, Milholland invites us to join her in a timely (and delicious!) interrogation of the ethics of food, housing, family, land, and self. As an affirmation and celebration of our deep and radical connections with the world and each other, her book gives me hope.”—Ruth Ozeki
“A delight to read . . . Full of flavor and spice, more umami than bitter, a little salty and never too sweet . . . Milholland’s life is full of rich material, but . . . she’s also serious about exploring the ideas behind communal living. . . . A generous book that gives the reader a lot to chew on.”—The Minnesota Star Tribune
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Lola Milholland grew up in the nineties, the child of iconoclastic hippies. Both her parents threw open the doors of their rambling house in Portland, Oregon, to long-term visitors and unusual guests in need of a place to stay. Years later, after college and after her parents’ separation, Milholland returned home. There, she joined her brother and his housemates—an eccentric group of stop-motion animators and accomplished cooks—in furthering the experiment of communal living into a new generation.
Group Living and Other Recipes tells the story of the residents of the Holman House—of transcendent meals and ecstatic parties, of colorful characters coming together in moments of deep tenderness and inevitable irritation, of a shared life that is appealing, humorous, confounding, and, just maybe, utopian—with a wider exploration of group living as a way of life. From spending time at her aunt and uncle’s intentional community in Washington State to finding her footing in the kitchen as a student in Japan to mushroom hunting in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, Milholland offers an expansive and vibrant reevaluation of the structures at the very center of our lives.
Charming, quirky, candid, and wise, Group Living and Other Recipes introduces a gifted memoirist and thinker, making a convincing case that “now is always the right time to reimagine home and family.”
PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN: 9781954118577
Price: $28.00
On-sale date: 8/1/2024
LOLA MILHOLLAND is a food-business owner and writer whose work has appeared in The Guardian, TIME, Oprah Daily, Slate, and elsewhere. A former editor for Edible Portland magazine, she currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and runs Umi Organic, a noodle company with a commitment to providing nutritious public school lunch.