Review: I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti

"There is logic and order to cooking. What you put into it has everything to do with what you get out of it. With love, it's not so cut-and-dried."

In I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti, a delicious and funny memoir, author Giulia Melucci, a New York magazine and book publishing PR exec, recounts the ups and downs of her romantic life, detailing the men she has dated and the food she cooked for them. It's a candid and unflinching account of a single girl's quest to find a husband...and finding herself along the way.

The book is divided into chapters by relationship, and the men are as quirky as they come. If they were presented as characters in a novel, they would be immediately dismissed as unbelievable. In a memoir, however, it makes for great entertainment...as in, "you just couldn't make this up if you tried." There are early red flags with each man, but Melucci's desire to be a part of a couple clouds her judgment every time.

She truly adopted the old adage of getting to a man's heart through his stomach and showed her love and affection for the men in her life through her talents in the kitchen, with some more appreciative than others.

One section, in particular, stood out to me as the best summarization of Melucci's approach to relationships:

"Thing was, I had a remarkable ability for turning any picture into the picture I wanted to see: me with a husband. My imagination had the flexibility of a thirteen-year-old Chinese gymnast."

I read this book in one sitting...not intentionally, but every time I went to put it down, I opted for "just one more chapter." While humorous, it is also sad, as we witness the author getting her heart broken again and again. But, each time, she picks herself up and dusts herself off, ever the optimist that the next one would be "the one." Also, the recipes are delectable (I'm trying her gnocchi with simple sauce of tomato and butter this week).