Trail of Crumbs’ subtitle is Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home. This is another of the many memoirs I’ve read about food and Europe. Kim Sunee was abandoned at age three in Korea and was adopted by a family from New Orleans. After college, she escapes to Europe in an attempt to find her identity. She falls in love with the man who founded LOccitane and lives a privileged life in Provence and Paris. However, she lives at the whim of this man and still seeks her own identity.
The book has been compared to Eat, Pray, Love, and is similar in the sense that both authors are privileged women whom you want to shake for being so insecure and dissatisfied when there are so many serious problems in the world. The author of Eat, Pray, Love, however, doesn’t take herself that seriously, so you can eventually laugh off her insecurity and enjoy her journey. Kim Sunee, author of Trail of Crumbs, takes herself very seriously — there is no humor in the book at all. Although I understand that being abandoned as a toddler combined with growing up as the only Asian in New Orleans would cause a child anguish, Sunee’s unhappiness seems so deep that I wonder whether she would have preferred the physical discomforts of growing up as an abandoned child in Korea to the emotional discomfort of the rootlessness she experiences. She describes her adoptive parents as distant, unable to express love, and she only expresses love for her grandfather, who taught her to cook and imparted his love of food to Kim.
The book does have lovely descriptions of France and the exotic locales that the author and her boyfriend visit, and has descriptions of the food she cooks along with recipes. Still, the recipes almost seem like a gimmick, as the book is much more about finding an identity and the search for “home” as it is a food memoir. Despite the fact that I could not relate to the author and grew impatient with her insecurities, this was still a book that I stayed up late reading, enjoying the setting and living the lavish lifestyle vicariously through Sunee, while waiting to discover whether she finds herself. Having written a best-selling book about her experiences, I can only assume she’s making progress.
