Group Living and Other Recipes

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

For readers of Braiding Sweetgrass and How to Do Nothingbooks that invite us to imagine better ways to live (and live with each other)comes a spirited and charming exploration of group living from a child of the counterculture that encourages us to redefine the meaning of home and family.

Lola Milholland grew up in the nineties, the child of iconoclastic hippies. Her momenergetic and intense at work and at play, whether at her job marketing for an agricultural co-op or paddling down a river, fat spliff in handhad spent her life revolting against the strictures of her American and Filipino upbringing. Her dad, a child of the eastern Oregon desert, was a jovial documentary filmmaker and historian who loved to collect ephemera. Both threw open the doors of the Holman House, their rambling home in Portland, Oregon, to long-term visitors and unusual guests in need of a place to stay. Years later, after college and after her parents separation, Milholland returned home. There, she joined her brother and his housematesan eccentric group of stop-motion animators and accomplished cooksin choosing to further the experiment of communal living into a new generation.

Group Living and Other Recipes tells the story of the residents of the Holman Houseof transcendent meals and ecstatic parties, of colorful characters coming together in moments of deep tenderness and inevitable irritation, of a shared life that is appealing, humorous, confounding, and, just maybe, utopianwith a wider exploration of group living as a way of life. From spending time at her aunt and uncles intentional community in Washington State to finding her footing as a student in Japan in the kitchen with her host family to mushroom hunting in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, Milholland offers an expansive and vibrant reevaluation of the structures at the very center of our lives.

Thoughtful, quirky, candid, and wise, Group Living and Other Recipes provides a convincing case that now is always the right time to reimagine home and familyand introduces a gifted memoirist and food writer in the tradition of Laurie Colwin, Ruth Reichl, and M.F.K. Fisher.

Reviews

"This is an intimate and captivating interrogation of home as told from the communal kitchens of Lola Milholland's most uncommon upbringing. Each episode and every recipe is a delicious study in grace with an immense love for the messy everything of life."--Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders

Author Bio

Lola Milholland is a small food business owner, social practice artist, and writer. Her work has been published by Gastronomica, Oregon Humanities, Meat Paper, Compound Butter, and others. A former editor for Edible Portland magazine, she currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and runs Umi Organic, a noodle company with a commitment to providing nutritious public school lunch.