Bookshop Best Nonfiction 2024

Group Living and Other Recipes is a rangy, loving memoir, an exploration of group living in the lives of friends and family, and a cookbook all rolled into one! It’s been surreal and powerful to witness it enter the world. Order your copy or buy from a local bookstore!

Published by Spiegel & Grau in 2024
Hardcover, audiobook & e-book
ISBN: 9781954118577 (ISBN10: 1954118570)

Praise

“Milholland celebrates communal living in this nourishing, cleareyed memoir, recounting years of conversation and shared meals that began with her childhood in Portland, Ore.”—New York Times Book Review

“Part memoir and part cookbook, Group Living and Other Recipes explores how the writer’s eccentric upbringing led her to seek community through food . . . with humor and empathy.”—Time, “The Best New Books to Read in August 2024”

“An inspiring account of how and why to live a principled life, spiced with Pan-Asian recipes.”—People, “Best Books of August 2024”

“Group Living and Other Recipes, Lola Milholland’s unusual memoir-with-recipes, is a delight to read, her descriptions full of flavor and spice, more umami than bitter, a little salty and never too sweet. . . . Milholland’s life is full of rich material, but the memoir is more than a series of anecdotes about the very interesting characters in her life. She’s also serious about exploring the ideas behind communal living. . . . A generous book that gives the reader a lot to chew on.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“In the tradition of genre-bending food writing that includes Ruth Reichl and James Beard, this debut memoir . . . pushes past the presumed confines of what a food-centered book can do, morphing into a cultural critique championing a community-centered approach to living, peppered with recipes.”—Portland Monthly

About Group Living and Other Recipes

Lola Milholland grew up in the nineties, the child of iconoclastic hippies. Both her parents threw open the doors of their rambling home in Portland, Oregon, to long-term visitors and unusual guests in need of a place to stay. Years later, after college and after her parents’ separation, Milholland returned home. There, she joined her brother and his housemates—an eccentric group of stop-motion animators and accomplished cooks—in furthering the experiment of communal living into a new generation. 

Group Living and Other Recipes tells the story of the residents of the Holman House—of transcendent meals and ecstatic parties, of colorful characters coming together in moments of deep tenderness and inevitable irritation, of a shared life that is appealing, humorous, confounding, and, just maybe, utopian—with a wider exploration of group living as a way of life. From spending time at her aunt and uncle’s intentional community in Washington State to finding her footing in the kitchen as a student in Japan to mushroom hunting in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, Milholland offers an expansive and vibrant reevaluation of the structures at the very center of our lives. 

Thoughtful, quirky, candid, and wise, Group Living and Other Recipes introduces a gifted memoirist and thinker, making a convincing case that “now is always the right time to reimagine home and family.”

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More Praise

“With intelligence and humor, Lola Milholland invites us to join her in a timely (and delicious!) interrogation of the ethics of food, housing, family, land, and self. As an affirmation and celebration of our deep and radical connections with the world and each other, her book gives me hope.”—Ruth Ozeki, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Form and Emptiness

“A timely examination of taking a different approach to the way we define home and family . . . Milholland’s guidance for group living means embracing contradictions: freedom and structure, being together and being alone, power and surrender, vulnerability and strength. Both entertaining and thought-provoking, this memoir is a good jump-off point for discussion on the topic of how we choose to live and provides a vision of one possibility.”—Cascadia Weekly News

“A pleasantly pragmatic book about the hardships and rewards of getting along with others and the joys found in cooking together . . . It’s hard to imagine a better fit for the zeitgeist right now than: unusual memoir and evocative food writing meets fun and easy recipe guide.”—Portland Mercury

“Entertaining and will make you think about how you’re living your life . . . Milholland looks at the way lives merge and flow past one another in a quest for stability within a chosen family, an endeavor that’s at the heart of many modern lives. This is a rich work as she asks what home looks like within a framework of personal memory, parental utopian ideals, and her own ethical concerns.”—KCRW Los Angeles

“Endearing . . . Clear eye[d] . . . [Milholland] reflects with humor and affection on growing up and making a life in the counterculture of Portland, Oregon.”—Kirkus

“Milholland paints an inviting portrait of life lived in the company of others. Readers will walk away feeling nourished.”—Publishers Weekly

“This thought-provoking memoir will resonate with those seeking solutions to the current loneliness epidemic, or for those challenging notions of what it means to live as an independent adult. Ultimately, it is an inspirational read about someone who consciously chooses to live according to her own values, without ignoring the work it takes to move through discomfort as it arises.”—Booklist

“This is an intimate and captivating interrogation of home as told from the communal kitchens of Lola Milholland’s most uncommon upbringing. Each episode and every recipe is a delicious study in grace with an immense love for the messy everything of life.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, New York Times bestselling author of World of Wonders

“Part memoir, part cookbook, and all heart, Group Living and Other Recipes is a feast for the mind, body, and soul. Readers will love how Lola Milholland deftly explores the intersection of food and life through savory recipes, the compelling stories behind them, and her fascinating path to creating community. It is a book that you will devour whole.”—Adrienne Brodeur, bestselling author of Wild Game

“Surprising, enlivening, and nourishing, Lola Milholland’s debut offers an engaging look at communal life up close. In doing so, it helped me to recognize the ways in which my own life is made possible by the work of so many others. (Plus Lola’s recipes are fantastic.) By this I mean that Group Living and Other Recipes helped me to care for the people I hold dear—what a tremendous gift!”—Elizabeth Rush, author of The Quickening and the Pulitzer Prize finalist Rising

“In this boisterous and original book, populated by lovable characters, Lola Milholland blends memoir, food writing, and revealing discussions of everything from housing equity to Filipino American identity to activism around denuclearization. The recipes are just as free-ranging and wonderful. A compelling, eye-opening read.” —Anya von Bremzen, James Beard Award winner and author of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking