Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball

I’ve just finished this book and it’s delightful! In fact, I kept wanting to interrupt my reading to write up a blog post about it to share it with you all, but that would have meant I had to stop reading it–and the reading won out over the writing.

Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball by Molly O’Neill is a delightful combination of a look at a family, including some family history that had an impact and the roles that baseball and food played in creating bonds and a family story. Unlike most family stories this is a story that will have an impact beyond the immediate next generation of the O’Neill family though.

Molly’s father, grandfather, and great grandfather played baseball. Her father pitched in the minor leagues and his desire to have a professional ball player or two and keep his boys out of trouble set the stage. Molly was the oldest child, followed by 5 boys, and she weaves the story of her growing up (and beyond) around baseball and food. Her mother cooked elaborate healthy meals and she would sneak around to cook the processed foods and other stuff that other families ate, of which she and her brothers were denied. Luckily for us, her passion for food led her to become a chef and the stories of her kitchen work and studying in France are as entertaining as the ones of her dressing her youngest brother in a dress, trying to fawn him off as the sister she desperately wanted.

It’s interesting to me to see, with hindsight, the ways that all our supposed detours and apparently odd decisions lead us to, ultimately, work we love and enjoy. Molly spins tales in her diaries, which seem to be mostly not-true her first year of college but still send her mother spinning when she reads them, writes poetry, paints, and works two jobs to put herself through college–learning to cook on the jobs that supported her. She eventually becomes a chef and then a food writer. She’s written three cookbooks so far (including New York Cookbook, which sounds fascinating) and was the food columnist for The New York Times Magazine.