Knisley, Lucy. Relish: My Life in the Kitchen. First Second: New York, 2013. Print.
Relish: My Life in the Kitchen is Lucy Knisley’s graphic memoir of food. She begins by talking about how most of her most vivid memories have connections to food and how this memoir will surely illuminate that fact for readers of all ages. Knisley tells her food life by bringing in some of her family’s favorite recipes(combined with pictures, of course) in conjunction with correlating chapters describing how that food played an important role in her life. Knisley uses food as a gateway into describing how she grew up. While the focus may be on food in this book, Knisley also discusses her changing family dynamics, as well as the many different people she met and the places that she visited throughout the course of her life.
Visual and textual style: conversational, pencil sketches, colorful, vernacular, realistic, nostalgic
Potential readers/appeal factors: memoir, foodie, recipes, family history, growing up, moving, divided into chapters
Awards
- Relish was featured as an Amazon top ten of 2013, a Goodreads top ten, and Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2013
- Relish was on the New York Times Bestseller’s List
- Named an ALA Alex Award winner, an Apple iBooks Best of the Year, a NPR Best Book of the Year
- Knisley won the ICPA award for Excellence in Illinois College Newspapers for exceptional cartoon or comic strip
- Knisley was a finalist in the Scripps Howard Foundation’s Charles M. Schulz College Cartoonist Award
Other pertinent information
- Knisley has a website at http://www.lucyknisley.com.
- Knisley studied at the Center for Cartoon Studies.
- Her first published book was French Milk, which came out in 2008. It is a drawn journal that talks about her life in Paris with her mother.
- She also has a book coming out in 2014 called An Age of License: A Travelogue, about a trip to a Norwegian comics convention, and another coming out in 2015 called Displacement, about a cruise she took with her elderly grandparents.
- Knisley also worked on two issues of Adventure Time, I Am An Avenger Issue #5, Pretty Little Book Epigraph, Radiator Days Epigraph, Make Yourself Happy Epigraph, and various anthologies.
