All over social media, you can find memes, tweets, and various other posts lamenting the “agony” of trying to figure out what to eat for dinner every night. Unlike the other domestic tasks of our lives, feeding ourselves is the one daily duty we can never truly escape, especially if we want to continue being able to live out the rest of our lives. When we add having to also feed a partner or a child or multiple children, worrying about what and how to nourish ourselves and anyone whose care has been placed into our hands can become one of the most defining and recurrent banalities of our domestic lives.
While author Krys Malcolm Belc does experience the exhaustion and overwhelm that comes with having to take care of the meals for his wife and four children every day, he would likely have difficulty relating fully to the aforementioned posts we see about “having to” make dinner for ourselves and others every night. In his new memoir, What I Made Dinner, Belc doesn’t explore the “having to” so many seem to experience and instead examines the underlying desire within him to provide for his family and friends through the cooking and baking that has come to help structure his days at home.
The memoir begins during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when Belc’s job allowed him to stay home with, take care of, and feed his (then) three young children while his wife, Anna, had to report to her nursing job. He traces his love of cooking for family and friends over the course of young adult and adult life, often ruminating on his experiences watching his mother cook and provide for their family of eight in various ways.
As pandemic isolation gets into full-swing, Belc returns to food media as an escape — primarily through the television and internet content of celebrity chefs like Stella Parks, Sara Moulton, Ree Drummond, Ina Garten, Claire Saffitz, and Laurie Colwin, among others — and uses what he knows of these women’s stories as a lens through which to express his own thoughts on domesticity, becoming and being a queer and trans parent, work, mental health, gender-affirming care, teaching, and on the value of giving to others in ways that also help fulfill us in the act of giving.
Early in the memoir, Belc writes,
“When did the desire for family life start to seep into my own? There isn’t a time I remember when my mother wasn’t mothering at least one child other than me. Feeding us took up an enormous amount of her time. We were the work of her life. My mother never pressured me to have children. Nobody wants or expects queers to do it. Of course, it’s only in retrospect that I understand I was a queer child. I didn’t know what that was. All I knew was that whatever my mother had, this life of cooking and cleaning, didn’t seem like something I was supposed to want, supposed to get.”
This question and the conflicts described here help create the central interrogations and tensions of the memoir. Belc and his wife have overcome significant obstacles to become parents, settle into that queer parenthood, and formulate a rhythm that helps govern their days.
The pandemic rages on and Belc and Anna are forced to slow down just like everyone else, forcing them into a period of reflection that causes Belc to realize they had “churned through life stages: moves, jobs, kid after kid. It was like we couldn’t stop, like we were some sort of millennial extremophiles, living our lives on hard mode for no reason.”
So, they decide to “stop changing their lives,” and then, another desire overtakes Belc, a desire he didn’t expect to pop up within him again: he wants to give birth to another child, a move that would ultimately lead to him going off testosterone, Anna having to donate her eggs in order for Belc to get pregnant again, and a bout of postpartum depression that forces him to take the first real break from the kitchen since his relationship with Anna began.
Through it all, Belc is anchored and held down by the women chefs whose recipes he’s made over and over again, altered for his family’s tastes, and learned from as he made the kitchen his domain. The lessons he learns from these women extend far beyond what happens in his kitchen and impact his own understanding of himself in ways both interesting and relatably revelatory for even those among us who don’t share in Belc’s domestic desires or have children of our own to care for.
His honesty about the ways he’s been shaped by these borderline parasocial relationships with these women leads to some of the most intriguing and urgent disclosures in the memoir. In his section named for Deb Perelman, the famous home cook and mother who was launched to food fame through her blog Smitten Kitchen, Belc confesses, “I am cooking to save my life, it seems. The edges of things feel softened, like I am not part of the same sharp reality anymore. I only feel myself when I am here, frosting a cake, cutting an onion into a steady, even dice. The service looks like it is for someone else, but above all, it is about me.” While many of us know and recognize this to be true, this is the most straightforward I’ve ever seen someone express the idea that providing for others can also serve as nourishment for ourselves — not in some abstract way, but within the confines of the material world we actually live in.
Having read both his previous memoir about queer family-making and trans pregnancy, The Natural Mother of the Child, and What I Made for Dinner, the most striking thing about Belc’s work is how intimately his writing concerns itself with the desire to be a participatory actor in the creation of something much bigger than one individual and how that creation impacts who he will become and is becoming as a result.
In What I Made for Dinner, he writes, “There is a thrumming need within me: to move my body, my hands, to make something of my time, to people the people I’ve helped bring into the world. To be and stay animated by my, and by others’, cyclical hunger. It’s how I relate to people, this creating.” For Belc, creating something new or creating a new experience with something that’s already a fixture in his life and in the lives of his family members isn’t a novel or ephemeral. It is the guiding principle of his world.
The act of feeding his family as many delicious and satisfying meals as he possibly can and of being not only a parent but a birthing parent are essential parts of that becoming — they are expressions of his love for the world he has helped build around himself, Anna, and their children. Towards the end of the memoir, in the section named for the famously childless Ina Garten, he explains, “Watching Garten makes me think, inevitably, about the decisions I might have made had I not made the foundational decision of my own early twenties: to have children. Anna has her vision of a life without them, and I can see her vision clearly. But for me, parenting was what gave me futurity. I only began to envision myself growing old in its context.” Creating the life he wasn’t “supposed to want” or “supposed to get” helps keep Belc alive, helps him keep hoping for a better future, and allows him to keep becoming the kind of person he most wants to be.
But that “thrumming” and the desire to fulfill that “foundational decision,” they had to come from somewhere, didn’t they? As with rest of the books in my personal pantheon of best memoirs that both of Belc’s have securely claimed their seat amongst, the propulsion to answer that seemingly simple yet incredibly complex question about his desires leads Belc to more questions and more radical recognitions of the truth as he tries to release the binds in the knotted climbing rope of his life. Through these new explorations, he proves the best “resolutions” aren’t actual answers. The best “resolutions” are somewhat intimidating challenges that lead us deeper and deeper into the core of who we are.
