Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner: Confessions of a Cartoonist Cook is structured like a cookbook, in chapters that include a "recipe" for making the dish that Hayden tried (and often failed) to cook in the preceding pages. Each chapter is a bit of memoir, from various times in Hayden's life, and all are about the preparation of food. As the title implies, Hayden's never been particularly good at cooking - and doesn't seem to have ever wanted to be, though she definitely resents that making meals is her responsibility mostly for she's-the-wife-and-mother reasons. So there's a lot of complicated emotions tangled up in her relationship with cooking - and, as readers of My Tits know [1], Hayden is really good at navigating through her complex emotional states.
I've been poking around her website, and goofing off in other windows, as I try to think about how to talk about how interesting and specific and strong this unique book actually is. I'm a man, and not the main cook in my family, so I don't have an obvious, direct way into this wonderful book about feminism, gender roles, family expectations, and that mix of anger, regret, bitterness, resentment, and just a bit of hope that comes out when Hayden finds herself in the kitchen, yet again, with a hungry family expecting her to feed them.
I can point at the things Hayden does well, even as I suspect I'm more like her husband "Jim" in the book: mildly clueless, wandering in when the work is mostly done, wanting to be helpful but never offering to actually do the difficult stuff. My own wife is the main cook in our family, and I think she falls somewhat farther on the "I want to be good at this" spectrum than Hayden does - but there's still the core cultural expectations: that the wife/mother makes all the meals, is responsible for taking care of the family, is the domestic goddess or the angel at the hearth or whatever depersonalizing term you want to plug in there.
Each chapter here combines both a story from Hayden's life, ranging from her own childhood, through the childhood of her two kids, up to her present empty-nest life. They're not in chronological order: Hayden hasn't structured Smoke in any obvious way, so it comes across as a cluster of stories she's telling us: they're all related, and each one leads naturally into the next one until she tells them all. Along the way, she gets into how her relationship with cooking was influenced by her own mother, and how that has changed over time - but keeps the focus on herself, on what she does in her own kitchen and how it makes her feel.
There's a lot to experience, to unpack, and to make the reader think about how they cook themselves (or don't, and let other people do it for them). Hayden has a wonderfully immediate cartooning style, mostly in four-panel grids, full of lines and color and action in every panel - it could all be too much, except that's the point, that cooking for Hayden is doing a dozen things at once that she never wanted to spend her time on. She wants it to be simpler and easier, but it never is - even in the few cases where everything goes right, it's always complicated.
(I will say one detail reminded me a lot of my own life - Hayden shows how her kids, when young, would get called out when dinner started inevitably burning to open all the windows and doors and flap their coats madly to disperse the smoke. We never did anything quite like that in my house, but whenever steak gets cooked, the smoke detector goes off - and I'm the one who gets to stand under it waving a big book or something until it stops beeping.)
I want to say something like "if you cook or eat, you'll find a lot to love here." I think that's basically true, actually. But if you're a woman, and particularly one who has been responsible for keeping the rest of the people in your house alive, I think it will be even more resonant and strong.
[1] Sorry not sorry, but I love being able to refer to a book that way. And it is appropriate in this case.
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