Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown by Sophie White

Sophie White earned a first class honours degree in Sculpture in NCAD before moving to New Zealand where she trained as a cook and learned to snowboard. After four years in the French Alps as a private chalet chef, she returned to Ireland to marry her boyfriend and spend time with her father while he could still remember who she was. In 2012 Sophie took up residency at the stove in Bibi’s Café, Portobello, and began writing her popular column ‘The Domestic’ for Sunday Independent Life magazine, which chronicles her life as a hungry woman, wife, daughter and mother.

Thirty-something-year-old Sophie White’s life appears to be going in exactly the right direction: perfect husband, adorable baby, nice house, interesting job … domestic bliss. But we all know that life is never that smooth and, more importantly, that your dinner isn’t always kale and quinoa. 

In this collection of recipes and rants, Sophie shares her life on a plate: from a brush with madness to falling in love; from almost running away from her wedding to getting unexpectedly pregnant (cue a gradual return to crazy); from surviving her mother and her son – her arch nemeses and her two favourite people in the world – to losing her father in his fifties to early onset Alzheimer’s disease.

And eating. Always eating. 

Part cookbook, part memoir, part self-help manual, Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown is a hilarious and refreshingly honest take on the life of a modern millennial woman – the perfect kitchen companion for laughing about the silly stuff, crying about the sad stuff, staring down our own personal madness and getting on with it (all while eating some delicious food along the way). 

‘Sophie White’s first book is hilarious, heart- breaking and honest to the point of astonishment’, The Sunday Independent

‘Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown is a genre-crossing gem that mixes memoir, recipes and rants. It’s not so much a breath of fresh air as a gale-force wind that will force a new conversation on a range of semi-taboo topics,’ The Irish Examiner

‘A book that is both beautifully honest and simply delicious’ Graham Norton