Sep 15

Sep 15 SAVOR: A Chef's Hunger For More, Ballantine 2022

James Beard Award Winner for Literary Writing

#3 on Oprah Daily’s Best Memoirs of 2022

SAVOR: A Chef's Hunger For More, Ballantine 2022 — SAVOR: A Chef’s Hunger For More, Fatima Ali with Tarajia Morrell, Ballantine 2022

It’s such an honor to have co-authored this unusual book. When the doctors told Fatima Ali she had a year to live, she hired me to help her write a book about fulfilling her bucket list — eating at the restaurants of her dreams, seeing the world, going out fighting. Tragically, Fatima was far too ill to get her wish and instead, two weeks before she passed, we spent a contemplative, intense, breathtaking week together: me asking questions, her telling stories, me recording. Her bravery was astounding and this book and its generous lessons are evidence of it.

PUBLISHING DATE: OCTOBER 11, 2022

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Excerpt From The New York Times Book Review:

In late November 2018, Fatima Ali, a talented and ambitious chef from Pakistan who had been the fan favorite on the 15th and most recent season of the cooking competition television show “Top Chef,” hired the food writer Tarajia Morrell to collaborate with her on an unusual memoir.
The job Morrell accepted was an exercise in the bittersweet. Ali, 29, had Ewing’s sarcoma and had just learned her cancer was terminal. The chef had been told she had a year left to live and she wanted help from Morrell documenting how she’d live it to the fullest, working through a culinary bucket list of legendary restaurants where she wanted to eat, including Noma in Copenhagen and Osteria Francescana in Modena.
Morrell (the writer and founder of the food blog Lovage) braced for a “poignant but delectable voyaging,” but those plans dissolved after a sudden acceleration of Ali’s cancer. Instead she journeyed only as far as Los Angeles to interview the chef in January 2019, in what would be the last month of Ali’s life. For a week they talked at UCLA Medical Center’s cancer ward, interrupted occasionally by Ali’s doctors, who were trying — generally unsuccessfully, and not always gracefully — to ease her constant pain. On learning that the stranger in the room was working on a book with his patient, one doctor asked: “What’s it going to be? A book about you by a bunch of people?”
“Savor” is certainly a collective work, spun from the willpower of a young, brown, Muslim, queer feminist who came to America seeking fame, freedom and influence, then knitted together by the people who loved her best, as well as her “hired witness.” Morrell’s voice is audible in the book’s introductory pages, and through Ali’s vantage in that scene with the doctor, but otherwise, the ghostwriter evaporates. “Savor” faced so many narrative obstacles that its existence is a triumph. But its expert execution is a true piece of editorial alchemy. . . . Ali comes across as being sensual, vulnerable and wise. Even as she righteously mourns all that she’s losing, she maintains a wicked sense of humor. She writes, ‘I want to leave something behind, something traceable, that could perhaps help others to ride the bull, to grab life by the horns.’ With Morrell as a posthumous guide, that is exactly what she has done with Savor.”
— The New York Times
Read a PDF of the full review by Mary Pols here.