Author Krys Malcolm Belc had long been the primary cook for his family of five: himself, spouse Anna, and their three kids. When the COVID 19 pandemic hit, however, preparing family meals took on new meaning. “The only thing that changes day to day now is the food that I made,” Belc writes in this book that is part memoir and part musings on self, parenting, domesticity, and their intersections.
During this time of isolation, Belc turned to online and television food personalities, including Sara Moulton, Ree Drummond, Claire Saffitz, Deb Perelman, Alison Roman, Ina Garden, and others, not only for recipe ideas, but as sources for exploring ideas of domesticity, public and private personas, relationships, and gender. Belc structures each section of the book around one of these celebrities and the lessons he has gleaned from each, using the framework to tell his own family story. That might seem like a gimmick, but Belc is a skillful enough writer that it works brilliantly.
He finds both resonance and contrast between the celebrities’ lives and his; for example, he says, “I’m looking for myself in Ina Garten and I see a woman who is bored and over-whelmed in equal measure by the endless onslaught of tasks involved in many versions of contemporary life,” but at the same time, he notes that Garten is childfree, while for him, “parenting was what gave me futurity. I only began to envision myself growing old in its context.” And he notes the wholesome domesticity of “Prairie Woman” Ree Drummond, whose universe is “as straight as can be,” and observes, “But as queer couplings have moved into the mainstream, the domestic angst once squarely within the purview of straights has become our sphere too.”
As Belc navigated the pandemic, he also decided to stop testosterone so that he could carry the couple’s fourth child. He explains:
I wanted to have a bodily experience that would help me feel truly alive, truly real. Why did I need to have a baby to feel like a real person, a real man? I was someone who had taken one of the essential facts of my life, that I was born a girl, and bent reality to my will. I wanted to do it again….
The book weaves in, too, his earlier family building, his experiences as a neurodivergent parent of neurodivergent kids, and his work as a teacher, but the particularities of his life rub shoulders with more universal parenting experiences. He writes, for example, “Being trans doesn’t make me special, doesn’t stop anything that needs to be done, the endless washing and feeding and caring,” and later asks, “Who has time for rational thinking about queerness and progress when you’re tired and lost in the thick of the endless to-do forest?” Parents of many identities may relate to his question, “Is parenting something I am, or is it something I do?”
Belc uses the lens of food personalities to cast a perceptive eye not only on his life, but also on parenthood and domesticity in general. This is the memoir of a trans parent, yes, and that is important, for there are relatively few such books, but it is also more than that, a captivating and insightful exploration of how people may find and make meaning in our lives and those of our families. Readers of all identities should find much to ponder in this highly recommended title.
Content warning: Suicidal ideation.
