How to Bake a Perfect Life

The satisfaction, pleasure, and calmness that comes from mixing, kneading, and baking bread is the thread that runs through Barbara O´Neal´s How to Bake a Perfect Life. So many heart-wrenching events happen in the lives of these three generations (and a fourth ghostly one) of women, but bread-making is their centering, the pivot around which their lives spin.

Professional baker Ramona Gallagher, her daughter Sofia, her mother Lily, her mother´s sister Poppy, and Katie Sofia´s step-daughter are the central characters. Off-stage is her grandmother Adelaide, whose bread starter is what starts this story and who features prominently in young Ramona´s life.

A young Ramona at fifteen is working in her father´s restaurant business when she´s seduced by one of the older migrant workers there and becomes pregnant. This inciting incident tears the family apart. Her mother shows her no support and drops he off at her aunt Poppy´s house. There, Ramona finds a measure of peace and acceptance, as she does with twenty-three-year-old Jonah. Lily cannot accept Ramona´s pregnancy and baby and makes poor choices in her words and behavior towards Ramona all through Ramona´s late teen years and onwards. Poppy remains steadfast in her love and support.

As she struggles to bring up her daughter and go to college, Ramona also works in the back office of her father James´s restaurant and other related enterprises. She finds that she´s good at accounting. And through this love, she meets Dave with whom she falls in lust and marries. When she discovering his philandering tricks, they part ways. However, James wants to keep Dave´s business acumen around, and so sacrifices his daughter´s happiness by firing her.

To make ends meet, Ramona, who knows only the restaurant business and how to bake that her grandmother and aunt taught her, opens a bakery and an ongoing feud with her family, including her sister.

But now Ramon´s bakery is teetering on the brink of collapse, and she´s in danger of losing her grandmother´s rambling Victoria house and everything she´s worked so hard to build.

In the meantime, Sofia´s husband Oscar is badly injured in Afghanistan and Sofia must fly to Germany alone and seven months pregnant to be with him, because Ramona cannot leave otherwise her livelihood will collapse. In so doing, Sofia´s step daughter Katie has to come to live with Ramona, because Katie´s drug-addled mother has been arrested. Katie resents this uprooting from everything she´s known even though her life was horrific by any standards. Here she is finds a measure of peace, of acceptance, even of love. And also discovers a love of gardening and baking.

While all this chaos in unfurling around Ramona, Jonah returns to town, and they discover that the feelings each had for the other are returned multi-fold. And thus begins a love affair that is guaranteed a happy ending for both of them.

Towards the end of the story, Ramona and Jonah find happiness together. Sofia´s husband Oscar is resigned to his injuries and determined to live, because he has a loving wife, Katie and baby Marcus to care for. Lily redeems herself by supporting Sofia at the hospital Oscar is in. Ramona and James make their peace when he apologizes for choosing to fire her and keep her ex-husband on when Ramona divorces Dane. Life is at a very sweet spot when the story comes to a stop.

"The best smell is bread, the best savour salt, and the best love that of children." —Graham Greene

What makes this story so wonderful is not merely the plot, though the threads are woven together is myriad complex ways, but the writing. Powerfully emotional and lyrically beautiful, O´Neal´s prose is as essential to the story as the characters and the setting.

An aside: I made the easy pain au chocolat from the recipe on page 15, and it was delicious.