Finding Freedom: A Cook's Story; Remaking A Life From Scratch Quotes
"The ability to touch a complete stranger with a plate of food, to feed them and awaken their senses while filling them up with joy—it’s an intimacy that you can’t help craving."
"Work consumed him and kept him from us, and when it didn’t, he was irritated and tired after his long shifts."
"He had always been telling me: 'Figure it out on your own,' but that didn’t make it hurt any less."
"I wasn’t surprised. He had always been telling me: 'Figure it out on your own,' but that didn’t make it hurt any less."
"It was a way to care for people—something that struck at the core of who I was and what drove me."
"I wanted crowds and noise. Northeastern University, in the heart of Boston, seemed like my ticket to that life."
"She wanted to settle down on a quiet road where the only sounds would be peepers in the spring when the ground started to thaw, crickets in the summer, and the slow engine of the occasional car or two that would pass each day."
"It was a sweet, celebratory, and eye-popping moment for me."
"The truth was, it felt like failure no matter what I chose."
"Getting pregnant was like dropping an anchor."
"They thought I was the good girl, the one it would never happen to."
"My feelings of heartache were intertwined with feelings of guilt."
"I knew we would never be together again, but I’d always be reminded of him every time I looked into the face of his child."
"He was so little that I thought I might drop him or break his tiny fragile bones."
"I never truly understood the depth and meaning of fear until Jaim was born."
"I was proud of the self-made life I was pulling together."
"I was nervous with the haste of it all, but I was happy, because maybe I wasn’t a fuckup."
"Well, they weren’t calling you, Tom, to tell you not to go through with it."
"I felt lucky and thankful and relieved that I had made it, and everything was going to be all right."
"Something that would draw people into the second-floor apartment of an unknown."
"What I did have was instinct—how to tell if a steak was done with the simple touch of my finger."
"I had made this moment come to life from nothing but dreams."
"I was cooking with local and seasonal produce, which meant having to constantly keep up with its daily arrival, changing the menu to do it justice."
"I wanted him to root me on, lift me up, and tell me that all this hard work was worth it."
"You’d never guess it now—he had a wife, two children, and was steady and reliable."
"The landscape of my home life had been slowly crumbling for a while."
"Tom and I were playing a game, and he was holding all the cards."
"I threw myself into the restaurant to hide from my painful reality."
"My depression had severed my ability to care."
"The ride home from the hospital in Rockland to Belfast was dark and fairly quiet."
"A good person in a bad place can do things she’d never imagine."
"He’d pull a pair of pliers from the pocket of his green wool pants and snip the hook from the bloody lip of the fish."
"The simultaneous protection order he filed kept me at a distance of five hundred feet."
"I could lean on him in this time of weakness, confusion, and need."
"I spent most hours wishing I wasn’t alive, and right now was no different."
"It felt like some twisted legal form of kidnapping."
"I was filled with a mix of emotions—anger, frustration, heartache, rage, and humiliation."
"I was devastated and struggled to search for reasons to keep living."
"My checked-out doctor upped my doses, doubled my antidepressants, and threw in a new mood stabilizer."
"I arrived on a dark, damp April night at the all-female rehab facility."
"I realized then that neither of them was going to leave the room."
"I had become so consumed with the exam that I hadn’t even noticed that my duffel bag had been overturned on the counter."
"I realized I had been making snap judgments about the other women there."
"I had raging night sweats the night before from my alcohol withdrawal."
"I was stuck in an entire ecosystem, moving weakened women around to fill beds and make insurance claims."
"I would get my boy back, and we would see better days in Freedom; I was sure of it."
"I may not have had a home or my son, and my world had crumbled around me, but I had a pot to piss in and a devoted dog to feed me love."
"I couldn’t imagine I’d ever appreciated a pee as much as this one."
"Walls had never defined me, like I had once thought. It was what I brought, from my heart, hands, and soul, to the space within that defined me."
"This camper didn’t need blessings, it needed a miracle in the form of another soul who knew what it felt like for imperfections to keep her from being loved—and a new set of tires to find her way back to Maine."
"It was the warm glow of candlelight and the hum of good music in the background."
"I could keep clinging to what had already transpired. Or we could let it all go."
"I didn’t need walls anymore, because I had wheels."
"We were both ready to shake ourselves free of the choices others had made for us."
"With each swing, I recounted all the ways that Tom had hurt me."
"I was letting go of all the shit I had been holding in the pit of my stomach."
"I had lost everything, but that also meant I had nothing to lose."
"Logic is the death of dreams. And it turned out that Tony and Sally favored dreams… and second chances."
"It was a moving vessel, like a sailboat, where I had to stay agile, dealing with the wind and adjusting accordingly."
"Because we had built it, and they were indeed coming—by the carload."
"And on top of it all there was critique to put up with."
"Feeding people felt so personal and intimate."
"I’d have to learn from the inevitable negative comments, use them as a tool to look at myself real deep."
"It was organic, the way that this village of women came to join me."
"Living in Maine can feel isolating and challenging."
"We were mothers, sisters, wives, farmers, makers, and teachers."
"The relationship that my sister had with my father differed from mine."
"I was the introvert: serious, independent, secure, curious, worried, thoughtful, and driven."
"It was as straightforward as putting pen to paper, licking a stamp, or postmarking a postcard."
"Because like my mother told me, that’s all life is made of: memories."
"We formed our very own village, and we had one another to lift up, root on, and love."