All Things Edible, Random and Odd: Essays on Grief, Love and Food by Sheila Squillante

A memoir-in-essays about father loss, food, and time.

Sheila Squillante had me at the subtitle. Grief, love, and food pretty much defines my entire life. Moreover, because I know Sheila and (book reviewer’s disclaimer here) consider her a friend, I knew this memoir-in-essays would be a literary smorgasbord.

Spoiler: it is.

We share several commonalities, Sheila and me. We are children of the ‘80s, Gen Xers, both writers, both Pittsburgh transplants. My daughter attends the same university where Sheila directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

And our dead fathers share the same birthday.

It changes you, losing a parent, but especially so when you—and they—are young and their passing is sudden and unexpected. Sheila’s dad was 46 when he died suddenly from a rare brain illness. Mine was 44 when a flu virus attacked his heart. Sheila was starting her senior year of college; I was a sophomore in high school.

Such monumental loss and the residual grief that can surface even decades later is the focus of All Things Edible, Random, and Odd (CLASH Books, 2023), a title born from one of Sheila’s poems. Her essays capture the jarring sense of time that comes with the realization that your friends are the same age as your father when he died (“Meat Ragu”) and “that feeling of being disoriented and displaced by more than geography” when returning, years later, to a place you once visited together (“Bodies of Saltwater”). There’s Sheila’s

“habit of counting up from 46 on my fingers, of looking into the faces of aging men and trying to find my father there. It feels wrong—voyeuristic and invasive, but the longing to know what he might have looked like at 50, 60, 70 compels me.”

There is the murkiness of memory in middle age of a father long gone.

“He fades in and out like an erratic radio transmission, mostly weak and far away, but sometimes sharp and clear and nearer to me than my own voice.”

(Nods head vigorously.)

Food serves as the catalyst for these sharp and clear recollections to take center stage because “between my father and me, food was a shared language that stood in for other, more explicit modes of affection.” In the standout essay “Dead Dad Day,” Sheila writes poignantly of her annual ritual on August 16, the last day of her father’s life.

“It is because I cannot remember my father without thinking about food, and it is because I cannot eat without remembering and missing him.”

“Turtle Soup” recalls how a road trip to visit potential colleges left Sheila “reeling with his insistence on all things edible, random and odd” — from trying a new soup to seeing quick glimpses of different side of her father.

(Another similarity: Sheila writes of her father’s out-of-character actions of intentionally swerving the car while driving to Creedance Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising.” An indelible, completely uncharacteristic memory of my dad is him at the wheel of his golden 1973 Pontiac LeMans, chauffeuring me to a friend’s house and spontaneously inching towards a red light by pumping the brakes to Kool and the Gang’s hit “Joanna,” a song I still cannot hear without smiling.)

That said, All Things Edible, Random, and Odd isn’t a saccharine collection devoted to romanticizing the deceased. (The emotion is palpable in “American Home Cookbook” as Sheila’s father chastises her mother during a dinner party because all the food is brown.) Rather, Sheila gives us a potluck, both stylistically and thematically. Some essays are written in recipe form— “Linguine with White Clam Sauce, serves four people on their way back from something hard” and “Chana Dal with Raita, serves six people at wit’s end.” Some essays don’t mention her father at all but serve as touchstones to his life, her loss, and the aftermath. Sheila poignantly captures an era of mixtapes, high school dances, first kisses, the awkwardness of teenager-dom and the first tentative steps toward adulthood with all its mistakes and heartbreak and subsequent losses that have a way of reminding you of the most significant one of all.

Of course, food features prominently in these essays, too. “Mother-Out-Law” juxtaposes Sheila’s memories of family dinners at a high school boyfriend’s house alongside her recollection of preparing an unforgettable Thanksgiving dinner at the same home, with the same people, many years later. The boyfriend is now an ex-husband; her new (and current) husband is in attendance, sleeping in said ex’s old bedroom with her. (“One friend suggested we get rich by writing a television pilot based on this one escapade alone.”)

As much as I wanted—and expected—to devour All Things Edible, Random and Odd in one bite, I found myself taking my time with these essays. In keeping with the gastronomic metaphors, it gave this reading experience a feeling of starting at a simmer then increasing to a satisfying boil. The ingredients in this collection are abundant: nostalgia, sadness, wistfulness, gratitude, understanding, humor, and whatever the word is for the sense one has of life coming full-circle, as it does when Sheila writes of her teenage son—who shares the same adventurous culinary spirit as the grandfather he never met—making turtle soup, the dish that bonded her and father together on that long-ago college trip.

“You know that loving anyone—however long they stay, whichever way they leave—means you take them with you. You take them in. It means you open yourself to grief—inconvenient, tender-green and tenuous. A delicate circle, always growing and alive.”

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I had anticipated doing an interview with Sheila to accompany this review. I’m out of practice with author interviews, however, and have struggled to think of original, insightful questions. (I hate profiles with banal, commonplace inquiries.) Instead, I want to direct you to several other places where you can learn more about Sheila and her work:

• Subscribe to her Substack, where Sheila’s been chronicling a new project during her sabbatical: The Dog Looks Like Three Boxes.

• Purchase All Things Edible, Random, and Odd: Essays on Grief, Love, and Food from Bookshop.org, a platform which supports independent bookstores.

• Visit Sheila’s website here.