From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home

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I began to gather from the exchange he and Sloane were having that he was leaving work at Acqua al 2, a well-known restaurant popular with locals and tourists less than a block away. As we turned onto Viale Alessandro Volta, the boulevard that would take me to my host family’s home, I got scared. I was lucky to be experiencing a veritable European dream of culture, art, and ideas, but I was doing it through a haze of cheap Tennessee whiskey. It’s easily one of my favorites that I’ve so far read this year, and it’s likely to make my “Top Books of 2021” list!

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Her superpower is matching people up with the perfect book, which she does on her podcast, Blind Date With a Book.In this unforgettable memoir, Tembi shows us how powerful—and ultimately uplifting—that journey can be. Children, enchanted with the large sloppy flakes, stuck out their tongues to the sky as their parents drifted into and out of coffee bars, murmuring in disbelief at the snow.

In Sicily, it is said that every story begins with a marriage or a death – in Tembi Locke's case, it is both. Okay, there are some “Godfather” jokes, but in the end, a Sicilian neighbor, who does not understand a syllable of English, tells her family that their daughter, Tembi, “is one of us. There was Saro in a white T-shirt, floor-length apron, white clogs, and red bandanna with James Brown hollering out, “This is a man’s world” from a boom box in the background. This book is the definition of a love story, while also demonstrating the greatest heartbreak imaginable.It is an honest testament of what is is like to care for someone with a terminal illness, and highlights the struggle of adjusting to becoming a family of 2 instead of 3. That first year they brought over some of Saro’s ashes, and though in each year that followed the sadness hadn’t truly dissipated, there was still, somehow, more joy in the simplicity of the Sicilian way of life, in her hard-won acceptance into a new family, and in food prepared with love. Twenty years into their marriage (and after reconciling with his parents), Tembi’s husband Saro passes away. I had finally surrendered to the fact that I couldn’t come at love from a defensive position—what I wouldn’t do, what rules I would have to follow. One of her favorite chores is after a meal, joining the other village women to shake out their tablecloths—in the middle of the road—so not to attract ants into their home.

There are hundreds of memoirs written, usually ghostwritten, often from those in the entertainment business.There was just one problem: Saro’s traditional Sicilian family did not approve of him marrying a black American woman, an actress no less. I wrote term papers on the Medicis’ artistic rift with Pope Leo X and moved into my own apartment with two other women—one American, one Canadian, and one very impish Italian DJ who slept with the Canadian.

He was inviting me into a vision for my own future that until that moment, I didn’t even know I wanted. And over the course of the night, as I fumbled through my kindergarten Italian, I stopped blushing, growing more and more confident with each conversation. From Scratch is the heartbreakingly, gorgeous debut that Reese Witherspoon selected as her May read for her Hello Sunshine Book Club pick. We want our loved ones to always be with us, and no matter how old we are, it always seems incomprehensible and unbearable when it comes time to have to say goodbye.So I pulled my coat tighter and tried desperately to remember where I had misplaced the gloves my grandmother in East Texas had sent.