Elissa Altman

Her first memoir Poor Man's Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking was published in 2013.[15] The book is based on her blog,[6] and described by Dawn Drzal in The New York Times as a "smart yet tender tale of her gastronomical and spiritual evolution" from New York City to rural Connecticut with her partner Susan Turner.[3][16]

Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw was published in 2016 and is a prequel memoir of her Jewish household in 1960s and 1970s Queens, and her experience coming out as a lesbian and marrying a Catholic woman.[1][17] According to Kirkus Reviews, "Altman not only reveals how she learned to interweave the contradictory threads of her life into a complex whole. She also gives eloquent voice to the universal human desire to belong."[17] In a review for Lambda Literary, Gena Hymowech writes, "I appreciate it when an author can take a random thing, like food, and recognize the way it symbolizes something else, something even more important. And that is exactly what Elissa Altman does in Treyf – food stands in for love, faith, and rebelliousness."[18]

Julie Wittes Schlack writes for WBUR, "The author, her conflicted father, her glamorous, self-starving mother, her friends who chant from the Torah on their bat mitzvahs, then celebrate with shrimp-in-lobster sauce at their post-shul luncheons at the Tung Shing House – they are all modern Americans alternately fleeing and embracing identities rooted in the ancient."[1] According to Publishers Weekly, "Her decades-long struggle to regain the happiness and comfort she felt in her beloved maternal grandmother’s home is depicted lovingly, with many moments of heartbreak and disappointment but also joy and contentment."[19]

Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing was published in 2019 and is a memoir that centers on her relationship with her mother.[20][21] Kirkus Reviews writes, "Funny, raw, and tender, Altman’s book examines the inevitable role reversals that occur in parent-child relationships while laying bare a mother-daughter relationship that is both entertaining and excruciating."[22] According to Publishers Weekly, "Throughout her life Altman struggles to balance devotion to her mother with a need to maintain boundaries for her own self-preservation, all of which comes to a moment of clarity when Altman decides to have children."[23]