Andie Mitchell wrote a memoir at twenty-five, and I've been teaching students that age for two decades. That fact alone made me skeptical. What does a twenty-something have to say that fills a book? Turns out — enough. Not always enough, but enough in the places that count.
I picked this up on a Sunday morning walk along the lakefront with Denise, one of those gray Chicago days where the wind off the lake makes you hunch into your jacket and just listen. And Mitchell's voice — her actual voice, narrating her own story — fit that mood perfectly. Quiet, a little raw, like someone talking to you at a kitchen table after everyone else has gone to bed.
The Weight of Cream-Filled Honesty
Here's what Mitchell does well: she doesn't prettify the ugly moments. There's a scene where she's at a restaurant and someone pressures her to order meatloaf instead of salad, and the way she narrates it — you can hear the old wound still tender underneath the composed adult voice. It's not dramatic. It's worse than dramatic. It's that quiet shame that anyone who's ever felt wrong in their own body recognizes instantly. My students write about this kind of thing in their personal essays, and I can always tell the difference between performed vulnerability and the real thing. Mitchell's giving you the real thing.
The childhood sections hit hard too. Food as babysitter, food as best friend — she's not speaking metaphorically. She describes a working-class Boston childhood where a box of something sweet was the most reliable comfort available, and you understand the logic of it even as you see where it leads. This reminds me of what Hemingway said about writing — the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. Mitchell's best passages work like that. She tells you about the food, but you feel the loneliness underneath.
Where the Pages Feel Thin
But here's where I have to be honest, because some of those negative listener reviews aren't wrong. At seven hours and fifteen minutes, this is a lean memoir, and there are stretches where it feels like Mitchell is filling space rather than filling pages with meaning. The Rome sections — the romantic streets, the handmade pasta — read a bit like travel blog entries that wandered into a different book. Pretty, sure. But I kept waiting for the deeper excavation that the early chapters promised.
One reviewer said there "simply isn't enough meat to fill the pages of a memoir when you're an average twenty-something," and while I think that's a little harsh — everyone's story has weight if they tell it right — I understand the frustration. The back half of the book rushes toward resolution in a way that feels too neat. Finding balance is hard, ongoing, messy work, and Mitchell sometimes presents it as something closer to an arrival than the daily negotiation it actually is. My students do this too in their essays — they want the ending to be clean. Life isn't clean.
An Author Reading Her Own Scars
The narration, though. This is where the audiobook earns its keep over the print version. Mitchell reading her own words gives the emotional moments an authenticity that a hired narrator couldn't replicate. When she describes stepping on that scale at 268 pounds on her twentieth birthday, there's a catch in her delivery — not theatrical, not performed, just a woman remembering a moment that split her life into before and after. The prose deserves to be savored in those moments, and at 1.0x speed, you get every breath.
She's not a polished narrator. Her pacing is occasionally flat during transitional passages, and there are moments where you can tell she's reading rather than inhabiting the text. But for a memoir this personal? I'd rather have the author's imperfect voice than a perfect stranger's.
Who This Is Really For
If you've ever had a complicated relationship with food — and honestly, who hasn't — this will land somewhere tender. If you're looking for a literary memoir with the depth of a Mary Karr or a Jesmyn Ward, you'll come away wanting more. My students would probably connect with this more than I did, and I mean that as a genuine compliment. Mitchell wrote this for people in the middle of their own reckoning, not for English teachers analyzing structure over late-night coffee. Alice Denham's Importance of Being Alice sits in that same territory — a woman writing honestly about her own life before she had the distance to fully shape it, and somehow that rawness becomes the point.
It's a seven-hour listen that could've been a devastating five-hour listen with tighter editing. But the honest parts? The parts where Mitchell stops trying to write a memoir and just tells you the truth? Those are worth your Sunday morning.
Worth the Walk, If Not the Whole Lakefront
I wouldn't call this essential listening. But I'd hand it to any of my students who came to me struggling with the distance between who they are and who they want to be. Mitchell's best insight isn't about food at all — it's about the exhausting performance of pretending you're fine. That's universal. That's why we still read memoirs. Even the imperfect ones.
