Marusya Bociurkiw’s Comfort Food for Breakups reveals the connections between food, memory, and life. Drawing on Bociurkiw’s Ukrainian upbringing in Alberta, Comfort Food is more than a simple memoir/travelogue filled with food, love, and loss. Food, for Bociurkiw, functions as an emotional time machine connecting her childhood to her adult life. “My recipe journals,” she writes, “are full of histories long and short: a couscous with harissa sauce made the night a butch lover first entered my kitchen; a marinara sauce that salved a breakup; my mother’s perogy recipe, scrawled, for some reason, on the back of a brown paper bag.”

The culinary complements to life’s heartaches weigh heavily on Bociurkiw. Her first-person narrative sometimes plods along, giving the book a heavy texture, and dialogue is a rare thing. Comfort Food will not be to everyone’s taste.

Fortunately, this book is served in easily digestible five- to 10-page installments. Recipes signal shifts from one time and place to the next, propelling the narration forward via how-tos on chocolate tortes, fish dishes, and other delights. Given her background as a filmmaker and academic, Bociurkiw’s strengths are in images and their deconstruction. Particularly poignant are her intricate memories of loves lost and loves found. The foods she ate – everything from perogies to tortes to simple pastas – give meaning and structure to painful, disorienting events and memories such as her father’s detainment in a concentration camp during the Second World War, as well as Bociurkiw’s troubled sexual awakening.

Upon finishing this book, a calm satisfaction prevails with the knowledge that you’ve consumed something that’s both good and good for you, though probably best enjoyed in small portions.