Greta Sesheta’s mother, Portia, was many things: a gifted educator, a generous spirit, a force of nature — and a woman the world didn’t always know how to hold. Kitchen School: Recipes for Life is the story of a daughter’s lifelong love for a complicated, beautiful mother, told through memory, reflection, and the sacred ordinary of a kitchen where wisdom was always made from scratch.

Set against the backdrop of mid-twentieth-century Black professional life in Los Angeles — civil rights America, Jim Crow dining rooms, and the quiet heartbreaks of a family doing their best — this memoir is both intimate and historical. It treats mental illness not with stigma, but with love and understanding. It follows the stages of a daughter’s understanding: the child who doesn’t know what to call what she sees; the woman who slowly pieces it together; the minister who finally names it, honours it, and offers it as a gift.