Recipes for Sad Women by Hector Abad

Sometimes I feel so happy, sometimes I feel so sad. Sometimes I feel like reading prose poetry masquerading as essays, and that's when I turn to this book. Recipes for Sad Women is many things at once: a book of recipes, sure, but also a meditation on women's sadness, a guide to relationships, a kind of treatise on the connection between feelings and food, and the platonic ideal of a self-help book. Abad has the loveliest voice, and writes about the struggles of a relational life with gentleness and candor and humor that, when approached by a reader who herself might be feeling a bit blue, oozes both empathy and practicality. I'm trying to get a jingle into your head. A furtive hammering of words that should sound cheerful. They don't always come out cheerful. Sometimes your sadness is contagious and I feel I can't make a joke. If I don't find a gag in the swarm of daily misery, I start sinking into the mud of boredom. And not until I develop a taste for boredom can I get out of it, t