Notes on a Banana by David Leite

Hardcover The stunning and long-awaited memoir from the beloved founder of the James Beard Award-winning website Leite's Culinaria - a candid, courageous, and at times laugh-out-loud funny story of family, food, mental illness, and sexual identity. Born into a family of Azorean immigrants, David Leite grew up in the 1960s in a devoutly Catholic blue-collar, food-crazed Portuguese home in Fall River, Massachusetts. A clever and determined dreamer with a vivid imagination and a flair for the dramatic, "Banana", as his mother endearingly called him, obsessed over proper hair care, yearned to live in a middle-class house with a swinging kitchen door like the ones on television, and fell in love with everything French thanks to his Portuguese and French-Canadian godmother. But David also struggled with the emotional devastation of bipolar disorder. Until he was diagnosed in his mid-30s, David found relief from his wild mood swings in cooking, Julia Child, and a Viking stove he named Thor. N