SOURCE: “‘The Only Hard Part Was the Food’: Recipes for Self-Nurture in Kaye Gibbons's Novels,” in Southern Quarterly, Vol. 30, Nos. 2-3, Winter, 1992, pp. 103-12.

In the following essay, Makowsky discusses the relationship between food and nurturing in Gibbons's Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman.

In an article on Katherine Anne Porter's Miranda stories, Kaye Gibbons observes that “Porter's language, for all its superficial simplicity, pulls the reader vertically towards submerged meanings and horizontally backward through time and memories” (“Planes of Language” 74). The same could be said of Gibbons's own novels. The narrators of Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman are relatively uneducated, but their apparently unsophisticated commentary is actually a palimpsest of meanings, drawing the reader through past, present and future. Food, Gibbons's major metaphor for these levels of significance, is as basic and instinctive as the voices of her narrators. In their preoccupation with meals, Gibbons's narrators...