Bread and Milk

From translator Saskia Vogel and one of Sweden’s most loved authors, an essayistic memoir about women and food

Bread and Milk traces a life through food, from carefully restricted low-fat margarine to a bag of tangerines devoured in one sitting to the luxury of a grandmother’s rice pudding. In this radiant memoir from one of Northern Europe’s most notable literary stylists, we follow several generations of women and their daughters as they struggle with financial and emotional vulnerability, independence, and motherhood. When Karolina finds herself a single mother to a young daughter of her own, food becomes the way for her to show her love, but also to instill a fraught and complicated inheritance.

The result is a lush, meditative memoir about the connections we make between food and love: how a mother’s emotional absence is filled by the food she painstakingly provides, how a missing father’s approval is granted for tomatoes sliced just right. Bread and Milk is at once wholly original and a natural extension of the brazenly intelligent and personal writing that has come to define Karolina Ramqvist’s authorship. After all, what we eat is inexorably intertwined with how we love.

”The strange thing is that, parallel to Ramqvist’s remembering, my own memories of food and people are activated, and suddenly there are tastes, smells and voices that I thought I had long forgotten.” – Svenska Dagbladet

“In such an associative and winding story as this, it is impressive how Ramqvist manages to keep a steady course. At times one is led to believe that she is taking a detour, but with safe hand she steers us back to the dinner table – and even if she occasionally leaves the kitchen, its aromas are always present.” – Västmanlands läns tidning

“Ramqvist’s skill as a writer does not only lie in her ability to neatly put the abyss into order, but rather in how she manages to depict the untarnished in the utterly boundless: the states that in and of themselves are neither wrong nor right, they just are.” – Svenska Dagbladet

“The relationship between mothers and daughters appears to be an inexhaustible subject in prose. And when food enters the picture my interest is piqued.” – Jönköpings-Posten

AUTHOR

Saskia Vogel

Saskia Vogel grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in Berlin, where she works as a writer and Swedish-to-English literary translator. She has written on the themes of gender, power, and sexuality for publications such as The White Review, The Offing, and The Quietus. Previously, she worked as Granta magazine’s global publicist and as an editor at the AVN Media Network, where she reported on pornography and adult pleasure products. She is the author of the novel Permission.

AUTHOR

Karolina Ramqvist

Karolina Ramqvist is one of the most influential writers and feminists of her generation in Sweden. She has written five novels to date and is widely celebrated for her powerful ability to provoke quiet yet fierce questions rather than provide loud and easy answers. In her skillful hands, contemporary issues of sexuality, commercialization, isolation, and belonging become highly charged and, at the same time, completely unaffected. In 2015 Ramqvist was awarded the prestigious P.O. Enquist Literary Prize for her novel The White City (Grove). The Bear Woman (2019) is her fifth and latest novel.

Reviews

“ltpgtSwedish novelist Ramqvists highly relatable memoir details the problems that can arise when a child associates food with loveThe term food memoir doesnt quite encompass her profound autobiographical journeyher story with its lush and evocative prose will speak to many readers ltbgtltemgtBooklistltemgtltemgtltpgtltpgtltemgtIf Annie Ernaux and Marcel Proust had a love child it would be ltigtBread and Milkltigt by Karolina Ramqvist A visceral and poignant exploration of the authors memories of her mother and grandmother through the lens of food and eating ltigtBread and Milkltigt tells a story that many of us share ltbgt Laurel Kane White Whale Bookstoreltbgtltbrgtltemgtltpgt”