I definitely checked this one out by mistake, thinking it was by the incredible Kate Atkinson (really, go read Life After Life right now, and then go read Behind the Scenes at the Museum right after) and was disappointed to find, mid-commute— when it was already too late to go back—that it was by Christensen. My disappointment as such never quite abated. To start, though the book postures as one of the foodie-memoirs so trendy now (see, e.g., My Berlin Kitchen or A Homemade Life), food was mostly tangential to Christensen’s story. Which is fine, of course, and even almost refreshing to not have to read page after page of orgiastic descriptions of eating, but it resulted in a feeling that what food descriptions there were were just shoehorned in.
Problematic on a deeper level is the fact that the autobiography never took the reader anywhere. Christensen’s life is, itself, not that interesting. This, of course, need not be a fatal flaw— a life doesn’t have to be particularly compelling or exciting to make great literature— but Christensen is neither reflective enough or sharp enough to make something meaningful enough to merit a memoir about what she does have.