grief

Rom-coms have a clear formula: the potential love interests meet early on in the story, the potential love interests face obstacles in getting together, the love interests then finally get together (potentially facing more obstacles before they are for real together together). Simple.

Why the rehash of a well-known genre, you ask? Because reviewers and whoever does the posters and promos at Netflix seem to think the limited series From Scratch is a rom-com. Some critics compared it to typical (if “elevated”) fare from Hallmark and Lifetime during the holiday season, and Netflix itself recommends viewers of the limited series to check out Love & Gelato (very much a rom-com) and Emily in Paris, which… I guess they’re related, if you want to watch something where an American goes to live in Europe for awhile?

It’s a frustrating diminishment of a moving drama based on Tembi Locke’s memoir of the same name. Created and partially written by Locke and her sister, Attica, the series follows Zoë Saldaña’s Amy, who meets future husband, Lino (played by Eugenio Mastrandrea) while studying abroad in Florence. The closest the series gets to the rom-com formula is its first episode, but even here one can see the deeper dramatic themes the series exemplifies: beginnings (and endings), beginning after an ending, and the emotions that so often characterize beginnings and endings—grief, love, hope, and regret. The stakes are also much more real than in a rom-com, with their often disposable significant others who are clearly not meant for one of the story’s potential love interests. This difference is made very clear in the first episode when Lino confronts Amy about doing something that has clearly hurt him to the core. Amy, who has mostly been treating her relationship with Lino (and others) like a short-term, just for fun, compartmentalized study-abroad experience, is forced to realize what she’s doing matters to him, and her.

The first episode also sets up another major factor the series will deal with, which are the realities romance must deal with in the real world: towards the end of her time in Florence, Amy is visited by her father (played by the inimitably voiced Keith David) and step-mother. Amy’s father is keen to get her back in law school and away from this art business she’s been studying in Florence. Her step-mother, played with a lovely warmth by Judith Scott, is equally keen to keep the peace.

It’s an experience many can relate to from their teens and twenties (or maybe even later), where conflicts flourish between the generations as the grown-up child begins to conform less and less with what their parents thought they were going to be. But what makes the series particularly lovely is how many years it traces (well over a decade): we see Amy’s relationships with her father, step-mother, and mother all develop, shift, and grow as she and Lino eventually marry, then adopt a child of their own some years later. And we get to see this happen with Lino’s family as well. Cultural misunderstandings abound, but are also worked through in ways that are not quick, easy, or melodramatic—the result feels much more real than the vast majority of dramas out there.

This is all assisted by there being no weak characters in the supporting cast of family and friends, as well as how excellent Saldaña and Mastrandrea are as the series’ leads. Even so, the standout in the familial relationships is Amy’s sister, Zora, played by Danielle Deadwyler. As Amy’s older sister, she clearly carried some of the weight for Amy as they both navigated their parents’ divorce, who separated while they were children. Rather than being a one-note supporting role, we see Zora as a fully rounded person. She is sometimes frustrated and annoyed with both Amy and Lino (particularly when they are forced to live with her for an extended period), but when it comes down to it, she is always there for them, no matter what heartbreak may come their way. Seeing such a fierce, loving, and caring person played with such depth is far too rare in storytelling, and Deadwyler’s sheer power and presence in the role makes it clear how important having such a person in your life can be.

It’s rare for stories to take the time to grapple with life so wholly as From Scratch does, and it being a limited series means it won’t be back for more, trying to scrounge up additional drama or character failings like some series have to do when they’re extended. It told the story it wanted to tell, and it actually left me emotionally rocked and in tears more than once—no mean feat, and certainly not something a rom-com is generally able to do (no matter how much I enjoy that genre). From Scratch is a family drama about love, life, and death, and it is not to be missed.

Book Cover for Kitchen, with a woman in a white dress standing shyly, with her arms behind her back. The novel begins with simple delight.

The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. White tile catching the light (ting! ting!).

To break down how much this opening does in establishing its modus operandi as well as its narrator and main character, a young woman named Mikage, would take more than the fifty-seven words of that opening paragraph. In the process, I would probably remove far too much of the pleasure it creates, so I’ll just say that if a narrator or narration uses a parenthetical like the above paragraph does to describe something as potentially bland as white kitchen tile, you’ve got me: I am 100% over the moon and in your corner.

So as the short novel continues and we learn Mikage is an orphan raised by her grandmother—and that her “grandmother died the other day,” we realize we have been opened up to feel her grief as rawly as Mikage does. The only spot she’s able to sleep in the apartment she shared with her grandmother is the kitchen: “wrapped in a blanket, like Linus.” The joy of that opening paragraph has been shifted and shot through with grief.

This situation can’t (but could!) continue, so it’s with relief that we see Mikage begin to befriend Tanabe, a young man who worked in the flower shop Mikage’s grandmother frequented—and who liked Mikage’s grandmother enough that he helped with her funeral. He lives with his mother, and he arrives at Mikage’s apartment one day to suggest she come live with them for a bit. Just while she tries to figure things out. Mikage is a bit disconcerted—as most would be—but finds herself liking the idea more and more. Unsurprisingly, on her first visit to Tanabe and his mother’s apartment, she explores the kitchen first: it has a lived-in disorder balanced by the quality of its plates and various implements. “It was a good kitchen. I fell in love with it at first sight.”

Kitchen’s strength is this seeming simplicity. I will admit there are times where either the translation or Yoshimoto’s writing is too simple for me, perhaps missing some of the poetry I prefer or the verve of that opening paragraph, but those moments are few and far in-between. There are far more moments like this for devastating truthfulness:

In the uncertain ebb and flow of time and emotions, much of one’s life history is etched in the senses. And things of no particular importance, or irreplaceable things, can suddenly resurface in a café one winter night. (p. 75)

So many of my favorite moments are ones such as these—reading, playing games, sitting on the porch and staring up at the night sky—letting those memories of important and unimportant things suddenly resurface in my mind’s eye. It’s why for Mikage—and the reader—that grief is not something you just get over or get through, it’s something that remains, becoming a companion that may hold its peace for any number of days, only to return unexpectedly with something as simple as a glancing outside a window of a café.

Most English copies of Kitchen come with a companion piece within its covers, a long story titled “Moonlight Shadow.” Knowing it was a companion piece, I was expecting to find the same characters as Kitchen, perhaps further along their respective paths, but instead it’s a story of two other young people also struggling with the loss of someone close to them: this time, a significant other.

It’s striking in the way grief plays out in similar ways, just with varied surface details. Where Kitchen’s Mikage obsessed over kitchens and cooking, the narrator of “Moonlight Shadow,” Satsuki, has taken up running to cope with the loss of her boyfriend in a car crash. She runs every morning, even when she’s not feeling particularly well, and has started to lose far too much weight. Hiragi, the brother of her deceased boyfriend, lost his girlfriend in the same automobile accident, and he’s gone to the extreme of wearing her uniform to school.

What “Moonlight Shadow” adds to the struggle of learning to live with grief is knowing that you will continue on past the death you cannot forget. That the one you once did everything with will no longer participate in your life as they once did—that you somehow survived and they did not. The story ends with Satsuki calling out to her boyfriend, hoping he will hear her:

Hitoshi:

I’ll never be able to be here again. As the minutes slide by, I move on. The flow of time is something I cannot stop. I haven’t a choice. I go.

One caravan has stopped, another starts up. There are people I have yet to meet, others I’ll never see again. People who are gone before you know it, people who are just passing through. Even as we exchange hellos, they seem to grow transparent. I must keep living with the flowing river before my eyes.

The simple things are how we live and love, as well as how we learn to live with grief, and the simple things are how we are able to continue, even as we cannot forget those we have lost.

The BFS Recommends From Scratch (Limited Series)

On Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen and Slowly Learning to Live With Grief