Food Was Her Country

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How can a god-fearing Catholic, immigrant mother and her godless, bohemian daughter possibly find common ground? Food Was Her Country is the story of a mother, her queer daughter and their tempestuous culinary relationship. From accounts of 1970s’ macrobiotic potlucks to a dangerous mother-daughter road trip in search of lunch, this book is funny, dark and tender in turn.

Bociurkiw’s Ukraine-born mother is a devotee of the Food Channel and a consummate cook. When she gets cancer of the larynx, she must learn how to eat and speak all over again. Her daughter learns how to feed her mother, but, more crucially, how to let her mother feed her. Food Was Her Country explores a daughter’s journey of grieving and reconciliation, uncovering the truth of her relationship with her mother only after her death. 

Marusya Bociurkiw’s Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl was a food writing phenomenon: the world’s first LGBTQ food memoir. With this long-awaited follow-up, Food Was Her Country draws upon a queer archive of art and activism, stories from her popular food blog, Recipes for Trouble, as well as social histories of food, evoking new beginnings and fresh ways of tasting the world.

Marusya Bociurkiw

Marusya Bociurkiw is an author, filmmaker, and professor. She has been producing films and videos in Canada for the past twenty-five years and those works have screened at film festivals and in cinemas on several continents. She has written five books, including the novel The Children of Mary, and the award-winning Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl, which was also shortlisted for the prestigious Lambda and Kobzar awards. More recently, her creative non-fiction entry, "A Girl, Waiting", was a finalist for CBC's 2015 Canada Writes award. She is an associate professor of media theory at Ryerson University, and Director of The Studio for Media Activism and Critical Thought. She has made ten films. Her latest, the documentary This Is Gay Propoganda: LGBT Rights & the War in Ukraine, has screened in 13 countries and has been translated into 3 languages.