Delicious Italian Food and a Lack of Cohesion: A Review of Monica Meneghetti’s WHAT THE MOUTH WANTS

What the Mouth Wants by Monica Meneghetti is, unfortunately, one of those books that just wasn’t for me. But let me try to talk about it a bit, in a way that will hopefully tell you whether it might be the book for you! First, check out that beautiful cover!

Meneghetti’s book—subtitled “a memoir of food, love, and belonging”—is a memoir told in short, vignette-like passages. Sometimes the passages are quick short, like prose poems. Other times they are more straight-forward recounting of past experiences, albeit occasionally written in the immediacy of present tense. Meneghetti writes about coming out as bisexual in a small town years before gay rights movements became mainstream, her mother’s death from breast cancer when Meneghetti was a teenager, complicated family dinners that are sometimes terrible, polyamory, her abusive dad, and food, food, food.

The memoir is strongly infused with Meneghetti’s traditional Italian-Catholic upbringing, whether she’s…