This was the March selection from the Kitchen Reader bookclub, chosen by Katherine Martinelli. Molly Birnbaum is a journalist who originally wanted to be a chef, but lost her sense of smell following a car crash. She tells the story of how the loss changed her relationship with food, but also her sense of her sexuality and her place in the world in general, and then describes her gradual recovery. By the end of the book, she is able to smell most things again, but finds she now struggles to interpret those smells. I found her descriptions of the changes in her experience interesting; the effects were far more wide-reaching than I would have guessed, even for an aspiring chef. Despite that, I found myself wanting to skip a lot of the passages about food; I think I'm actually starting to get a bit jaded with food memoirs. Fortunately for me, though, there are some different genres coming up in the next few months' choices.

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