PURCHASE TICKETS
$43 Reserved Section Seating + Book*
$95 Reception**(6:30-7:30pm)+ Reserved Section seat + Book*
$20 General Admission Seats
* Books will be picked up at the event, and signed immediately after the talk
** Reception will include selections prepared from Padma Lakshmi’s recipes

Padma Lakshmi is the host of the Emmy Award-winning, top-rated Bravo series Top Chef, and the author of two cookbooks: the award-winning Easy Exotic and Tangy, Tart, Hot & Sweet. The first internationally successful Indian supermodel, she has appeared in numerous fashion spreads and has walked the runway for designers Ralph Lauren, Emmanuel Ungaro, and Alberta Ferretti, and starred in campaigns for Versus and Roberto Cavalli. 

Love, Loss, and What We Ate  is a vivid memoir of food and family, survival and triumph; and traces the arc of Padma Lakshmi’s unlikely path from an immigrant childhood to a complicated life in front of the camera—a tantalizing blend of Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone and Nora Ephron’s Heartburn.

Long before Padma Lakshmi ever stepped onto a television set, she learned that how we eat is an extension of how we love, how we comfort, how we forge a sense of home–and how we taste the world as we navigate our way through it. Shuttling between continents as a child, she lived a life of dislocation that would become habit as an adult, never quite at home in the world. And yet, through all her travels, her favorite food remained the simple rice she first ate sitting on the cool floor of her grandmother’s kitchen in South India.

Poignant and surprising, Love, Loss, and What We Ate is Lakshmi’s extraordinary account of her journey from that humble kitchen, ruled by ferocious and unforgettable women, to the judges’ table of Top Chef and beyond. It chronicles the fierce devotion of the remarkable people who shaped her along the way, from her headstrong mother who flouted conservative Indian convention to make a life in New York, to her Brahmin grandfather—a brilliant engineer with an irrepressible sweet tooth—to the man seemingly wrong for her in every way who proved to be her truest ally. Her memoir includes evocative recipes, and is alive with the scents, tastes, and textures of a life that spans complex geographies both internal and external.

Love, Loss, and What We Ate is an intimate and unexpected story of food and family—both the ones we are born to and the ones we create—and their enduring legacies.

Aimee Liu is the best-selling author of Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders and the novels Flash House, a tale of suspense and Cold War intrigue set in Central Asia; Cloud Mountain, based on the true story of her American grandmother and Chinese revolutionary grandfather; and Face, 
a psychological mystery involving mixed-race identity. These books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Liu’s articles, essays, and short stories have appeared in anthologies and periodicals such as The Los Angeles Times, Ms., Cosmopolitan, Self, Glamour, and Good Housekeeping. She is a past president of the national writers’ organization PEN USA and a current member of the faculty of Goddard College’s MFA program in creative writing at Port Townsend, WA. Visit her website.