“There’s so much I want to do with my life, but like most people I’ve wasted so many pointless days on anger and misunderstanding, on self-doubt and stagnancy. Since my diagnosis, many people have told me that they admire me —that they respect how I’ve chosen to face it, to fight it, to keep pushing forward, but I often feel like a fraud. I’m just a human being who longs for more life. I, too, feel like I wasted so much time. Maybe that’s just it: Since finding out I was sick, I’ve been trying to steal that time back, to make the most of every day. It’s funny. When we think we have all the time in the world to live, we forget to indulge in the experience of living. When that choice is yanked away from us, that’s when we scramble to feel.
(Savor, by Fatima Ali, p.285)
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how much life energy I lose worrying about the opinions of others. These thoughts are sparked by the new rhythm of pain and energy that shapes my days and by an incredible book I read recently titled Savor: a chef’s journey for more, written by Fatima Ali with Tarajia Morrell, and published posthumously in 2022 after Fatima’s death in 2019.
Savor is a book about living truthfully. In 2018 Fatima Ali, a twenty-nine year old New York-based Pakistani chef receives a diagnosis of bone cancer, and is told she has a year to live. She decides to use her remaining time to accomplish her bucket list of eating at the best restaurants, visiting chefs and places she has always hoped to visit. Tarajia Morell is the writer she chooses to make this journey into a book.
As Tarajia outlines in her introduction, this plan quickly changes as Fatima’s health deteriorates. Instead of a year together, they spend a week together in the hospital in January 2019. On January 25 2019, Fatima passes away, and in the intervening 3 years since her death this book was born.
(None of this is a “spoiler” - it is all outlined in the first few pages of the book)
Why I think it’s worth reading: This book is so many things: testimony on dying, a mother-daughter love story, an exploration of living in Pakistan, loving descriptions of Karachi, a discussion of what it can look like to lose yourself in marriage and heal afterwards from divorce, an exploration of excellence and commitment to craft, the nurturing that happens within brother-sister relationships and the challenges of collectivist cultures among so much more. Most of all though, it is a urgent call to live honestly - to speak about the things that truly matter, to forgive, to let go, to cherish one’s life.
Throughout the book, Fatima’s understanding of what she is trying to do as a chef changes as she continues to develop her skills. Seeing her journey toward a deeper sense of clarity made me think more about the purpose of this space, this newsletter. My best description at this point is that this newsletter is for broken-hearted but whole people who are committed to building and living lives of beauty, joy, contribution, and expansiveness. It is meant to be like kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. It’s a space for readers to receive reflections on books, essays on my own life, book and art recommendations that hopefully leave you with the comforting feeling of a warm cup of tea. The brokenness is from heartache, from unexpected loss, and the act of repair is from a deep commitment to honour the gift of life.
Image by ededchechine on Freepik
Of all the themes that this book discusses, one that I am thinking about most is the challenges of collectivist cultures and the impact of intergenerational trauma.