My First Popsicle: An Anthology of Food and Feelings
by Zosia Mamet
Why You'll Love This
Food turns out to be the sneakiest way to write about grief, identity, and longing — and this anthology proves it on almost every page.
- Great if you want: personal essays where a single meal carries unexpected emotional weight
- The experience: dip-in-and-out reading — each essay stands alone, moods shift widely
- The writing: voices vary sharply across contributors — some lyrical, some blunt, all specific
- Skip if: you prefer a single sustained narrative voice over a mosaic of perspectives
About This Book
Food is one of the few things we experience with our whole selves — body, memory, emotion, longing. My First Popsicle, curated by Zosia Mamet, gathers an eclectic group of writers, artists, and cultural figures to explore exactly that territory: the meals that shaped us, the dishes we can't separate from grief or joy or becoming, the bite of something that sends you hurtling back to a version of yourself you'd almost forgotten. This is not a cookbook or a food memoir in any conventional sense. It's a collection about what we carry, and how taste and smell and hunger refuse to stay neatly in the past.
What makes the anthology work as a reading experience is its range — in voice, in tone, in what each contributor decides "food and feelings" actually means to them. Some pieces are lyrical and ruminative; others are sharp, funny, or unexpectedly raw. That variety keeps the pages turning in a way a single authorial voice might not. Mamet's curation has a genuine point of view without being heavy-handed about it, and the result is a collection that rewards reading in both long stretches and stolen moments between other things.