"Trail of Crumbs" | Identity more elusive than love

"Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home"

by Kim Sunée

Grand Central, 374 pp., $24.99

Like M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child and other American writer-gourmands, Kim Sunée met her culinary and literary destiny in France.

There, she also discovered that truly belonging is much harder than finding romance or learning a delectable way to prepare French truffles.

Sensuous, observant and sprinkled with mouthwatering recipes, Sunée's memoir, "Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home," is a luxuriant read at times — and a rather callow one at others.

Sunée weaves us through her interesting personal odyssey. Born in Korea, abused and abandoned at age 3, she was adopted by a white American couple from New Orleans. Sunée often felt like an outsider growing up there, but took refuge in the warmth of loving grandparents and adored the Big Easy's cuisine (recipes for Crawfish Bisque and other such delicacies are included in "Trail of Crumbs").

Much of her book, however, concerns Sunée's sojourn in Europe in the 1990s. Drifting around after college, she was living in Sweden when a charismatic French millionaire some 20 years her senior fell hard for her.

The dashing Olivier Baussan, the philanthropic founder of the perfume company L'Occitane, swept the 22-year old Sunée off to France and into what sounds like a charmed existence.

During her years as mistress of Olivier's Provence villa and Paris flat, Sunée became a superb chef, turning out dishes such as Figs Roasted in Red Wine with Cream and Honey, and La Daube Provençal for their many dinner parties. She also describes the great sex, great companionship and swell designer clothes she had, and perhaps the ultimate luxury that Baussan gave her: her own poetry bookstore in Paris.

You may well ask, as did her friends and family: Who would walk away from this Vogue spread of a life? Yet frustrated by her doting lover's controlling ways and his protracted divorce from the mother of his daughter, Sunée went solo to teach English and embark on less-satisfying affairs.

Where "Trail of Crumbs" gets bogged down is in Sunée's hand-wringing ambivalence about leaving Olivier in order to "grow up." She begins to break away after a trip to Korea, to find her "roots," turned out to be a fruitless, desolate quest.

It propels her into therapy. Of her wrenching breakup with Olivier soon after, Sunée writes, "I'll never forgive myself for not knowing what I want, why I don't want what he has to give me — love and a place in the world I don't have to fight for, an identity that isn't mine."

The reader may not be sure either. Who needs an identity when you've got a French villa with a swimming pool?

Seriously, one can't help feeling that Baussan might not be so thrilled about the young woman who dumped him revealing intimate details of their affair in a heavily publicized book. Ironically, the most savory parts of the book are about their years together, along with Sunée's portraits of French friends and New Orleans relations — sharply drawn, affectionate.

And, mais oui, there are those scrumptious recipes — for dishes that are unapologetically rich in butter and crème fraîche. A warning: Just reading them may raise your cholesterol.

Misha Berson is The Seattle Times theater critic.