The follow-up to Independent Publisher Award winner, Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl, reflects on the tenious relationship between a queer daughter and her terminal mother. At turns tender, dark and funny, FOOD WAS HER COUNTRY tracks a tempestuous mother-daughter relationship and the life-long culinary journey that leads them from estrangement to common ground. For Bociurkiw's mother, born in Soviet Ukraine and raised in an Alberta convent school, food was the only language her proto-foodie daughter could understand. From humorous accounts of an obsessive teenager in the 70s who creates a year's worth of extravagant Sunday desserts for her family, to a dangerous mother-daughter road trip in search of lunch, these linked vignettes ponder the ways in which relationships can rupture and reconcile, evoking healing new beginnings and fresh ways of tasting the world.

Marusya Bociurkiw's COMFORT FOOD FOR BREAKUPS: THE MEMOIR OF A HUNGRY GIRL was a food writing phenomenon: the world's first queer food memoir. With this long-awaited follow-up, Bociurkiw reflects on how memoir records, invents, and re-imagines, to the ire and bemusement of family members. She draws upon a queer archive of art, protest and relationship drama, stories from her popular food blog RECIPES FOR TROUBLE, as well as social histories of food, to offer an eclectic and exciting literary meal.

Marusya Bociurkiw is an author, filmmaker and professor. She has been producing films and videos in Canada for the past twenty-five years and those works have screened at film festivals and in cinemas on several continents. She has written five books, including the novel The Children of Mary, and the award-winning Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl, which was also shortlisted for the prestigious Lambda and Kobzar awards. More recently, her creative non-fiction entry, “A Girl, Waiting”, was a finalist for CBC’s 2015 Canada Writes award. She is associate professor of media theory at Ryerson University and Director of The Studio for Media Activism and Critical Thought. She has made ten films. Her latest, the documentary This is Gay Propaganda: LGBT Rights & the War in Ukraine, has screened in thirteen countries and has been translated into three languages.

Marusya Bociurkiw's profile page