Metz's Perfection chronicles with lapidary precision one woman's climb back to happiness after not just a spouse's death, but also the shocking recognition that her life before that death was not what she had thought it was. The journey is a painful one, but Ms. Metz is much the stronger for having survived to recount it.

Sometimes, if you want to be happy, you've got to run away to Bath and marry a punk rocker. Sometimes you've got to dye your hair cobalt blue, or wander remote islands in Sicily, or cook your way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year, for no very good reason.

Cooking saved my life! Sure, there were some miserable moments, but that was sort of the point, to find something challenging and consuming enough to take a place in the center of my life into which was creeping a horrible feeling of stasis and the doom of mediocrity.

It's sad, but a relief as well, to know that two things so closely bound together can separate with so little violence.

There are times with your friends when you just have to put their whole mess out of your mind for a while.

Nowadays anyone with a crap laptop and an Internet connection can sound their barbaric yawp, whatever it may be.

The road to hell is paved with leeks and potatoes