“How can a god-fearing Catholic, immigrant mother and her godless, bohemian daughter possibly find common ground? Food Was Her Country is the story of a mother, her queer daughter and their tempestuous culinary relationship. From accounts of 1970s’ macrobiotic potlucks to a dangerous mother-daughter road trip in search of lunch, this book is funny, dark and tender in turn.”
2018 Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Biography
Praise for Food was her Country
Brett Grubisic
The Toronto Star
“An absorbing reminiscence that’s sad and consistently regretful — and yet a delight to read — Bociurkiw’s companion volume to Comfort Food for Breakups, her 2007 memoir, meditates on and interweaves family, migration, rejection, history, and loss.”
Elisha Lim
Author of 100 Crushes
“It’s a joy to witness Bociurkiw’s funny, self-deprecating, deeply loving elegy for her mother, Vera. Her mother is her muse, and the memoir runs chronologically from her mother’s early homophobic distance to her fond old age. Bociurkiw’s crisp, buttery phrases are as delicious as the dishes that she inherits.”
Sarah Schulman
Author of Conflict Is Not Abuse
“…in this moving memoir, Marusya Bociurkiw reveals how both mother and daughter fought for a relationship on new terms, where both could retain their autonomy without controlling the other’s life. The author’s discoveries are illuminating for the reader, and articulate possibilities of understanding with individuation, rarely imagined or realized.”
“Traversing decades and continents, Comfort Food for Breakups is an elegiac, sensual, and beguiling memoir about food, family, and personal history by fiction writer and filmmaker Marusya Bociurkiw. In these intimate vignettes, food–soup, eggs, chocolate truffle cake, perogies–nourishes, comforts, and heals the wounds of the past. Knishes recall a father haunted by memories of time spent in a concentration camp during World War II; chocolate evokes memories of queer girls and liasons in dim lesbian bars.”
Finalist,The Golden Crown Literary Award, Lesbian Short Story Essay Collection
Winner, Independent Publisher Award (SILVER), Autobiography/Memoir
Winner, ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award (GOLD), Autobiography/Memoir
Finalist, Lambda Literary Award, Women’s Memoir/Biography
Shortlisted for the Kobzar Literary Award
One of Quill & Quire’s Books of the Year, 2007
“My name is Joe, and I AM Canadian!” How did a beer ad featuring an unassuming guy in a plaid shirt become a national anthem? This book about Canadian TV examines how affect and consumption work together, producing national practices framed by the television screen. Drawing on the new field of affect theory, Feeling Canadian: Television, Nationalism, and Affect tracks the ways that ideas about the Canadian nation flow from screen to audience and then from body to body.”
The Children of Mary
As teenagers in the ’70s, Sonya and Kat are trying desperately to be hip in the Ukrainian ghetto of North End Winnipeg. After her sister dies under mysterious circumstances, Sonya spends the next decade trying to figure out why.
The Woman Who
Loved Airpots
Sexy and funny, these stories move across identities and communities, from Baba’s kitchen and suburban shopping malls to the demi-monde of queer sex and love.
Halfway to the East
Halfway to the East is a collection of poetry that travels across Canada to Eastern Europe and Asia, tracing a genealogy of place and displacement, creating a polyphony of identity and voice.
Big Affect: The Ephemeral Archive of Second-Wave Feminist Video Collectives in Canada
“From 1972 to the early 1990s, Canadian feminist media collectives created dozens of social-issue documentaries and television series, producing an ephemeral archive of a vibrant era of political and social change. This article discusses the loss and/or deterioration of the material object of research, and it attempts, instead, to account for affect…”
Bringing Back Memory
From “Unbound”
“It had taken me weeks to make this phone call. A Scotch on the rocks beside me, for courage. I was ready to hang up at any moment. Should the need arise. My mother’s voice, deep and unworldly (she’d had her larynx removed) came on the line. I thought I could hear wind. And crackling electricity. And ocean. We chatted. The weather. The grandchildren. World affairs. Her latest method for making really good chicken stock. (Use a crockpot). Then back to my food memoir. The book was about to go to press. A question. I needed to ask.
But first…”
Additional Articles
“Old Homophobia is Rising Again in the US”,
NOW Magazine, June 15 2016.
“Bringing Back Memory” in Grekul & Ledohowski eds., Unbound: Ukrainian Canadians Writing Home, U of T Press, 2016
“Meet the New Ukraine: Feminist and LGBT Activists Building Civil Society”,
Rabble.ca, June 2014.
“Apple Cake, LGBT Refugees & The War in Ukraine” Daily Xtra! November 2014
Marusya Bociurkiw 