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Diane Purvey and Christopher Walmsley, Eds. Child and Family Welfare in British Columbia: A History

Marusya Bociurkiw. Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007. 171 pp. $19.95 sc. Over the past thirty-odd years, scholarly and public debates about multiculturalism have highlighted the ways in which cultural diversity is neutralized and contained by the official sanctioning of song, dance, and cuisine. These expressions of ethnicity, ostensibly divorced from the fraught histories and complex day-to-day realities of ethnic and "racialized" minority groups in Canada, have been critiqued as trite and superficial. Marusya Bociurkiw's new book, however, implicitly offers a compelling challenge to the notion that cuisine constitutes an emotionally-uncomplicated and apolitical aspect of minority subjects' lives. A welcome, "Ukrainian Canadian" addition to the growing body of "food-focused" life writing--which includes Fred Wah's Diamond Grill (1996), Austin Clarke's Pigtails 'n' Breadfruit: A Culinary Memoir (1999), and Laura Elise Taylor's A Taste for Paprika: A Memoir (2004)--Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl successfully resituates what and how we eat as cote elements of identity-formation. Poet, novelist, film-maker, and academic (shortly after completing her Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, in 2004, she took up a position at Ryerson University), Bociurkiw is no stranger to those with an interest in Ukrainian Canadian and/or queer cultural production. In addition to producing nine films, she has published The Woman Who Loved Airports, 1993; Halfway to the East, 1999; The Children of Mary, 2006. Shortlisted, but astonishingly passed over, for the 2008 Kobzar Literary Award, Coin fort Food for Breakups should garner from "mainstream" audiences the recognition that Bociurkiw so richly deserves. Certainly, in terms of its structure (rather than a linear or chronological unfolding of the author's life, the text is divided thematically into four parts, "Mama's Kitchen and Beyond"; "Food for the Soul"; "Food Voyages"; "Food for the Body"), its hybrid genre (the narrative borrows from the conventions of biography, autobiography, travelogue, and recipe books), and its attentiveness to a broad range of intersecting, politicized concerns (ethnicity, sexuality, diaspora, transculturalism), the book will appeal to literary scholars from multiple sub-disciplines (Canadianists, multicultural literature specialists, queer theorists, and theorists of life writing, to name a few). But it is Bociurkiw's writing itself, characterized by a seemingly effortless poignancy, that will render this memoir, for any reader, moving and memorable. Indeed, from the opening sentences of the preface, when readers are called upon in the second person to experience a visit to her grandmother's home ("[y]ou arrive at her house, matching Samsonite luggage at your side"[13]), we enter an intimate bond with Bociurkiw: welcomed simultaneously into Baba's kitchen and the narrative, we are "kissed profusely on both cheeks" and "pushed into a chair"; then, "no matter what the time of day or night, the eating begins"[ibid. …