Terroir: Essays from a Perpetual Outsider

Eight essays exploring how identity is shaped by place and its people"Terroir" refers to the environment in which a wine is produced-climate, the earth and its minerals, water, weather, and wind-and also to human intervention, for example, how and when a row of grapevines is pruned. In her essay collection Terroir , Natasha Sajé applies this concept to people and their relationships, exploring in particular how the immigrant experience has shaped her identity. As she revisits people and literature across her life, she plumbs the language through the filter of place, which becomes a powerful, grounding motif: her experiences as the child of Eastern European refugees in suburban New Jersey, taken under the wing a widowed neighbor; her college summers spent abroad waitressing in Switzerland; her interracial marriage to Tyrone and the accompanying intolerance they experienced in Baltimore; and finally her years as a widow in Salt Lake City facing an unsanctioned love with her wife.Combining travel and food writing, incisive social commentary, and poetic lyricism, Sajé's essays explore issues central to our time, including nationality, race, class, sexual orientation, and religion. Hers are not tales of melancholy or victimization but rather stories of human understanding. Taken as a whole, the essays posit terroir as critical to the creation of human identity-that is, as Sajé's environment changes, so does she. And even in the most hostile and improbable places, love still blossoms.