**New York Times Bestseller**
From Erin French, owner of the critically acclaimed The Lost Kitchen, a TIME world dining destination, a life-affirming memoir about survival, renewal, and finding a community to lift her up
Long
before The Lost Kitchen became a world dining destination with every
seating filled the day the reservation book opens each spring, Erin
French was a girl roaming barefoot on a 25-acre farm, a teenager falling
in love with food while working the line at her dad’s diner and a young
woman finding her calling as a professional chef at her tiny restaurant
tucked into a 19th century mill. This singular memoir―a classic
American story―invites readers to Erin's corner of her beloved Maine to
share the real person behind the “girl from Freedom” fairytale, and the
not-so-picture-perfect struggles that have taken every ounce of her
strength to overcome, and that make Erin’s life triumphant.
In Finding Freedom,
Erin opens up to the challenges, stumbles, and victories that have led
her to the exact place she was ever meant to be, telling stories of
multiple rock-bottoms, of darkness and anxiety, of survival as a jobless
single mother, of pills that promised release but delivered addiction,
of a man who seemed to offer salvation but in the end ripped away her
very sense of self. And of the beautiful son who was her guiding light
as she slowly rebuilt her personal and culinary life around the solace
she found in food―as a source of comfort, a sense of place, as a way of
bringing goodness into the world. Erin’s experiences with deep loss and
abiding hope, told with both honesty and humor, will resonate with women
everywhere who are determined to find their voices, create community,
grow stronger and discover their best-selves despite seemingly
impossible odds. Set against the backdrop of rural Maine and its lushly
intense, bountiful seasons, Erin reveals the passion and courage needed
to invent oneself anew, and the poignant, timeless connections between
food and generosity, renewal and freedom.
