Harlot’s Sauce is titled A Memoir of Food, Family, Love, Loss and Greece, and that it certainly is. What’s remarkable about this memoir and sets it apart from others in a similar vein is how much Greece herself becomes a character in the story. To borrow a tagline used with some regularity these days: there were three people in her marriage. The fact that one of them was a country makes it all even more interesting to read.
Patricia met ‘Gregori’ and fell in love. Their cultures were different - she was American-born of Italian descent and he was Greek born and a reluctant immigrant to the States – but, on the surface of it, not wildly so. After all, Patricia and her Jewish friend Margie’s home lives are already dominated by the guilt trips, family occasions and obligations inherent in their cultures when compared to those of their WASP friends Donna and Kurt.
Mixing two cultures need not involve a clash. Margie demonstrates this as, with some understanding (and a little amusing sleight of hand when it comes to naming ceremonies), she marries an Irish Catholic boy and starts a family. However, things are somewhat different for Patricia. She not only has to contend with some cultural shifts but with the fact that neither she nor Gregori recognises or accepts that they are diametrically opposed on all the things that matter.
This is more than a book about a broken marriage, although many will find themselves relating to it on that level. At its core, it is about a woman discovering the best and worst of her trusting yet headstrong character, and using a major episode in her life to, in a very real sense, find herself. We use that phrase often but never is more clearly defined than in the final chapters of Harlot’s Sauce.
Even the large chunks of the book that are not set in Greece are dominated by it, from arguments over how long to go there on holiday to carrying out Greek traditions while mourning the devastating loss of a close relative. Gregori’s domineering attitude and the dismissive way women are treated by some of his friends are shameful examples of the worst of Mediterranean culture.
It helps that Patricia understands that which she is writing about. As a Greek reviewer, I had the benefit of a near-automatic insight into the culture, but seeing Greece through the perspective of a ‘foreigner’ who truly opened her heart to the country was extremely valuable. Many of the traditional beliefs and old-fashioned values shocked me because I believed they had died out, and at first I worried that this outmoded view would be what remained for anyone reading the book. After all, Patricia Volonakis Davis is not the only woman to admit to suffering through a marriage with an overbearing Greek man, but it is still not an accurate picture of the whole country. Luckily, this is a far more balanced memoir than that, and far from becoming a stereotypical bogeyman, Greece is declared the heroine of the piece by the author herself.
Stereotypes exist for a reason, and even when all the exceptions are taken into account, a grain of truth remains. The important thing is to recognise this and criticise only what hurts others, and not what is merely unfamiliar, and Volonakis Davis does this with admirable emotional clarity.
To cap it all, Volonakis Davis either has an insanely good memory for conversational detail or is capable of creating very witty, human, readable dialogue from the dregs of recollection. Her tongue is often firmly wedged in her cheek as she leads the reader deftly from a self-deprecating observation to the confession of an intimate detail and round again. Her passions – teaching, raising children, loving, eating, enjoying beautiful scenery – are evident without any repetition or cliché. Most of all, her unflinching honesty about both herself and others is what holds all the elements of food, family, love, loss and Greece together.
If there is a criticism to be made, it’s one that I suspect comes down to author versus editor. From my point of view, a slower development and more detail of life in Greece would be more valuable; it would feel more of a book in two halves, rather than a long lead in with a somewhat sudden conclusion. Despite the great business success and personal epiphanies that help Patricia see a way onward and upward, the last third of the book seems slightly rushed in comparison to the rest; it appears likely there was a conscious decision to sacrifice some of the personal and political awakening of the author in order to keep the focus on the dynamics of the marriage.
Even that is a limited problem. Omitted chapters will be found online after the book debuts next month; you can visit Patricia’s website , get a new chunk of insightful wisdom from her regularly updated Vox blog or enjoy the Harlot’s Sauce Radio writer’s portal she edits if you’re clamour for more, which you will.
Harlot’s Sauce: A Memoir of Food, Family, Love, Loss and Greece is on sale from November 1st 2008.
Image via Patricia's Website