Book review: How An Egg Changed My Life: A Memoir by Mikey Bell

Desmond Clifford

How An Egg Changed My Life is part memoir, part cookbook. More accurately, it’s a memoir in which chapters are interspersed with recipes and cooking instructions but where the food, and the circumstances in which they were originally cooked, are put at the service of memory and key life moments.

For author Mikey Bell, food has marked the key signposts in his life.

The preoccupation with food wasn’t always so obvious growing up in Bargoed. His most immediate and obvious challenge was coming to terms with being gay.  Not that he felt bad about it – he seems not to have, and his family were supportive – but he still faced difficulties in what was a predominately masculine culture.

Although the legal and societal cultural environment around being gay is more benign now than in previous generations, it’s easy to assume that life’s easy for everyone – which it isn’t, especially children.

Mikey Bell writes engagingly about these early school years, his crushes, being bullied, his sense of feeling isolated and left behind by the rituals of teenage development all centred around the hetero experience.

On the positive side, his family were positive, a huge advantage, and he seems to have had a good circle of sympathetic friends, girls for the most part.

Life at Swansea University didn’t provide the galvanising identity and energy Mikey was hoping for. I reckon memory of university life is one of the great social dividers.

There are those for whom it represents the best days of their life, against which everything else comes up short and disappoints; and there are those, like Mickey, for whom university itself is a disappointment, the expected excitement and belonging don’t materialise, social experience enhances loneliness and the sense of being freakish rather than relieving it.

I’m firmly with Team Mikey on this. Nevertheless, he found a tribe – sympathetic girls again.  And he learned how to make carrot cake, which is duly recorded.

Mikey moved to Cardiff, the nearest thing Wales has to offer to Carrie Bradshaw and the Bowery. Like all but the well-organised and the lucky, he had a messy and incremental introduction to the world of work and adult living.

His emergence into adulthood coincided with the rise of social media and dating apps, the perils of which he describes. After some misfires, he found a boyfriend, lost a boyfriend – and found some more recipes.

Recipes had become the spine running through his life.  He did what anyone who really loves food should do and moved to Italy.

In Florence he learned to cook like an Italian (not, apparently, the same thing as cooking Italian food).  While there he hooked up with “the only other Welsh boy in Florence” (surely that’s a book title, right there..?).

He returned to Wales more skilled and ultimately more certain of himself; the two things are related.

The later part of the memoir describes the search and acquisition (is that the word..?) of a full and permanent partner. Together they navigate the modalities of planning for mature adult life, “settling down” as we grotesquely call it.

Pleasing

Mikey’s memoir has a “happy ending”, which is pleasing to note. Truthfully though, the early part of the book, the times of struggle, are more interesting for the reader, though not necessarily more agreeable for the author whose life it describes.

There’s the rub, and the painful truth about memoir and life-writing: the inverse relationship between personal happiness and literary interest. In other words, what makes life painful is usually, or at least often, more interesting than the happy parts. Sad but true.

Life-writing, or memoir, has become a very large element of contemporary Welsh literature, in both languages. Without it, the current Welsh non-fiction genre would be greatly diminished.

Is there room to worry about an over-reliance on this form? Is there a risk of squeezing out the non-specific, of undermining exploration of wider topics? The individual matters but Wales is more than a series of single stories.

Blessed

Mikey Bell has a facility for words and makes a living from writing about food. He does so engagingly and without pretence in a field where that is often not the case.

His writing is fluent though occasionally there’s just a little too much caster sugar in his carrot cake. He describes well the confusions of growing up gay and searching for his place in the world of contemporary Wales. He was blessed with friends and allies, but struggle is struggle.

This is a good and easy read. It is touching at times and witty throughout. Mikey tells his story with warmth.  It is interspersed with recipes related to the text and meaningful in the author’s life.  You may even feel inspired to store the book in the kitchen rather than the library shelf.

How An Egg Changed My Life is published by Calon Books and is available to buy here and at all good bookshops.

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