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About this item
Highlights
- In this poignant, delicious memoir, American tax preparer and food writer Steve Hoffman tells the story of how he and his family move to the French countryside, where the locals upend everything he knows about food, wine, and learning how to belong.
- About the Author: Steve Hoffman shares one acre on Turtle Lake, in Shoreview, Minnesota, with his family, an ill-behaved puggle, and roughly 80,000 honeybees.
- 368 Pages
- Biography + Autobiography, Culinary
Description
Book Synopsis
In this poignant, delicious memoir, American tax preparer and food writer Steve Hoffman tells the story of how he and his family move to the French countryside, where the locals upend everything he knows about food, wine, and learning how to belong. Steve Hoffman is a perfectly comfortable middle-aged Minnesotan man who has always been desperately, pretentiously in love with France, more specifically with the idea of France. To follow that love, he and his family move, nearly at random, to the small, rural, scratchy-hot village of Autignac in the south of the country, and he immediately thinks he's made a terrible mistake. Life here is not holding your cigarette chest-high while walking to the café and pulling off the trick of pretending to be Parisian, it's getting into fights with your wife because you won't break character and introduce your very American family to the locals, who can smell you and your perfect city-French from a mile away. But through cooking what the local grocer tells him to cook, he feels more of this place. A neighbor leads him into the world of winemaking, where he learns not as a pedantic oenophile, but bodily, as a grape picker and winemaker's apprentice. Along the way, he lets go of the abstract ideas he'd held about France, discovering instead the beauty of a culture that is one with its landscape, and of becoming one with that culture.Review Quotes
"This is a beautifully written book, reflective, sometimes ruthlessly so, occasionally sad and often funny. I started reading skeptically and found I could not put it down. One can only hope for a sequel."--The New York Times, "Best Wine Books of 2024" "This funny, fluidly written memoir . . . sends Hoffman into the lives of his neighbors and the vineyards of his community, where his curiosity, humility, and labor serve to cohere his vision of France, his family, and himself."--Food & Wine, "Our Favorite Food Books of 2024" "Sentences . . . so polished that you will marvel at their brilliance."--The Washington Post "Hoffman is a reflective and often lyrical writer . . . [his] newfound abilities--and the bumpy road to acquiring them--could be put to use in a very bingeable Netflix series."--The Wall Street Journal, "The Best Books for Every Type of Wine Lover This Holiday Season" "It's quite possibly the best autobiography I've ever read."--Tamlyn Currin, Jancis Robinson sustainability editor and staff writer
About the Author
Steve Hoffman shares one acre on Turtle Lake, in Shoreview, Minnesota, with his family, an ill-behaved puggle, and roughly 80,000 honeybees. He is a writer, tax preparer, and occasional French villager. He is the winner of the M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award at the James Beard Awards, as well as an IACP Bert Greene Award for narrative culinary writing and five Association of Food Journalism awards.Dimensions (Overall): 8.0 Inches (H) x 5.19 Inches (W) x .75 Inches (D)
Weight: .62 Pounds
Suggested Age: 22 Years and Up
Sub-Genre: Culinary
Genre: Biography + Autobiography
Number of Pages: 368
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
Format: Paperback
Author: Steve Hoffman
Language: English
Street Date: July 15, 2025
TCIN: 1002988440
UPC: 9780593240304
Item Number (DPCI): 247-38-0337
Origin: Made in the USA or Imported
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Estimated ship dimensions: 0.75 inches length x 5.19 inches width x 8 inches height
Estimated ship weight: 0.62 pounds
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Holly O - 11 months ago
I was really excited to receive and Advanced Reader Copy of this book because the combination of travelogues and memoirs is totally my jam. The writing is beautifully descriptive and I delighted in feeling like I was right there with him in the Languedoc. As you meet his neighbors (who eventually become friends) you start envisioning yourself moving there and wish that they would take you under their wing and show you how to just live in the moment as they were trying to teach Steve. The way he writes about food and wine will leave your stomach grumbling and wishing that you had maybe a small plate of some figs & runny cheese nearby to nibble on, with a really nice tannic red wine to languidly sip on while devouring these pages. I feel like the underlying theme is everyone wants to feel like they belong. It starts out with a young Steve Hoffman heading off to Paris and wanting to prove that he is not just some tourist but a "true" French citizen, and dealing with imposter syndrome which feels like follows him on his later journey back to the French countryside as an adult with family in tow. Ultimately it feels like he learns to let go and just savor the moment, which is something we all should try and do a bit more frequently.