Grace Dent’s memoir – an ambitious appetite
- Book: Hungry
- Location: Carlisle, London
- Author: Grace Dent
I first stumbled across Grace Dent in 2012, as I travelled home on the 18:15 from Waterloo. She penned restaurant reviews for the frothy Evening Standard ES magazine on Fridays, injecting her acerbic wit and culinary perception into restaurant reviews for weary commuters. She wrote her ‘Grace and Flavour’ column from 2011 to 2017, but you may well have encountered her withering words, northern tones and chiselled cheekbones in several other places.
A broadcaster, author and columnist, Grace has been a regular face on Masterchef since 2013, she presents the award-winning series The Untold on BBC Radio 4, she is the restaurant critic for the Guardian, has written nine books for young adults and has become one of those ‘talking heads’, who pops up in your living room with increasing regularity. Have I Got News for You, Great British Menu, Pointless Celebrities, BBC Two’s recent Book Club Between the Covers….Grace has been in all of them, and more. As well as continuing with a prodigious output in print.
Not bad for a working class lass from Carlisle.
Hungry is Grace’s ‘memoir of wanting more’, tracing her story from growing up in a small community just south of the Scottish border to making it as a media star in the bright lights and fancy eateries of expense-account London. She’s not even 50 yet, so you might question if her life to this point justifies a memoir. But this is an insightful and entertaining read, stripping bare the hungry ambition of a chubby little girl from the north, telling us how she clawed her way up each rung of the London media ladder, only to be pulled back to Carlisle to care for her ageing and infirm parents.
It’s all recounted with Grace’s trademark mastery of language, imparting information with devastating wit and wisdom.
‘The Dents’ trolley contained virtually no spice, heat or evidence at all that Britain (in 1980) was part of the global commonwealth. Or that we even had much to do with Europe. We fried in White Cap lard. We ate Presto medium-sliced, slightly plasticky white bread. Our cheese was orange, almost always Cheddar, and we were still cagey about the idea of melting it.. Rice was always white and it was used almost exclusively for puddings, which my mother would make in the oven in a glass dish.’
After school and a degree from Stirling University – scraping in through clearing – Grace’s hunger to succeed soon sees her climbing the corporate media ladder in London, embracing the urban excesses of the 90s. Drink, debt, late nights…and food.
‘How could I go back to Carlisle now I’d fallen in love with the slimy pink lox and pungent mashed herring at Sammy Cohen’s all-night beigel shop? Or Korean gochujang sauce over a bowl of bibimbap? Or fierce Scotch Bonnet chilli, hiding in a plate of ackee and saltfish? I loved chow mein, but I also now loved pho, ramen, udon and fideu.’
But just as I feared success and a laser work focus would ruin Grace, in the way it had her brief marriage, she is pulled back to Carlisle and a nicer, younger self. Her Mam gets cancer and her dear Dad begins to suffer from dementia. The latter part of the memoir describes her exhaustion – mental and physical – as she and her brother care for ageing, ailing parents in a rented bungalow in the Lake District, while Grace juggles newspaper deadlines, Masterchef filming and restaurant reviewing.
Finally, they bow to the inevitable and Dad has to go to a home.
‘Dad is no longer here, but he is still in every room we sit in for weeks and weeks and months and months. Dad’s space at the table will always be empty, The wound I have about Dad only ever seems to grow the slenderest of scabs. The merest memory makes it bleed.’
Keep this up, our Grace, and you’ll be an official National Treasure by the time you’re 60.
Looking forward to the next memoir….
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