My First Popsicle: An Anthology of Food and Feelings

Actress Mamet offers a collection of essays about the power of food to connect, nourish, and comfort, as well as the countless emotions that food engenders—joy, grief, love, loneliness, helplessness, stress, and more. This book was inspired by a video of a friend’s son experiencing a popsicle for the first time. The child’s amazement and bliss drove home the point that, more than anything else, food connects with our emotions and memories. The 50 essays in this collection were contributed by Mamet’s friends and colleagues—artists, actors, chefs, and comics. A full cast, including the authors, narrates the stories with vivacity and wit. Some author-narrated tales, such as Richard Shepard’s remembrances of his visit to the renowned sushi restaurant Sukiyabashi Jiro, are simply exquisite in their honesty and relatability. Others, such as David Sedaris’s essay about his diet of hot dogs and sugar-free Jell-O, are disappointing—not because of the story, which is fantastic, but because listeners miss out on hearing it read in Sedaris’s iconic voice. Occasionally, listeners may be confused when stories by different authors are performed by a single narrator and with identical characterizations for each.