ENOUGH

Ahern, well-known for her award-winning gluten-free cookbooks (Gluten-Free Girl Every Day, 2013, etc.), compiles a series of essays that explore her childhood, young adulthood, marriage, and motherhood.

In her first collection, the author explores a question the doctor asked her after a stress-induced ministroke landed her in the intensive care unit. “Where in your life do you not feel good enough?” he asked. “It was the question that compelled me,” she writes, “over the next year, to start letting go of everything that didn’t bring me joy.” The first place she had to start was with her parents, particularly her mother, who suffered from panic attacks and kept Ahern’s life “entirely restricted.” As she writes, “I was not allowed to visit a friend’s house, by myself, until I was seventeen.” Her parents fought every day, but there was never a mention of therapy for anybody in the family. Ahern discusses her low self-esteem due to her body size, the difficulty of being a virgin into her mid-30s, and finding friends and building a community of people around her that made her feel safe and complete. She discusses how she and her husband wrote cookbooks and started a gluten-free flour company (an endeavor that caused extremely unhealthy levels of stress), her daughter’s difficult infancy, and her gradual easing into and acceptance of herself despite her faults. Ahern’s narrative will resonate especially with small-business owners, women who have difficult mothers, and, most of all, those who have issues with body image. “I am fifty-two years old now,” she writes. “Instead of waiting for permission to love my own body only if it is sufficiently small enough, I have surveyed what I am lucky enough to have, from my feet on the ground to the top of my head, and find joy in this body now.”

A candid, instructive memoir of self-growth.