A Dirty Life Review

The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love by Kristin Kimball

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I enjoyed this memoir and Ms. Kimball's story. It really was quite fascinating that she would give up everything she knew: her career, her home, her city all for love and a farm. During parts of the story I totally wanted to become a vegetable farmer. I quickly got over it and realized that a small garden with a few tomato plants would be all that I could ever manage though.

There was a lot of farming jargon that I did not understand. I was reading it on my Nook, so I did a half-hearted attempt to lookup words but if the Nook didn't recognize it then I just moved on. So during those descriptions I could not visualize what she was talking about. This was mostly the machinery that they used for the fields.

There was definitely a part where I skipped paragraphs. I am not a fan of weird foods. It makes me gag just thinking about them! Talking about eating hearts and livers made me squeamish enough but when she broke out the whole section on what they did with the testicles and blood, well, I just skipped the page. Seriously, I almost gagged. But that is just me.



I did run into a few parts that I had to wonder if what she wrote was true, kinda true but embellished, or just made up all together. Blame this on my pessimism of memoirs. Between James Frey and now Greg Mortenson, I am totally wary. The first time I started questioning her was in the beginning of her story where she talked about cooking at the farm where she was interviewing Mark for the first time. In one paragraph she discussed her lack of cooking skills, even admitting that she never once used her oven in 7 years. The next paragraph was a huge description of how she walked into the very well stocked kitchen and knew immediately how to chop, steam, sauté and poach food. My friends that have no cooking skills do not even know those words let alone how to just immediately walk into a random kitchen and start doing all of those things. I’m a pretty good cook and I wouldn’t know the first thing to do with Kale let along to know to sauté it and then poach eggs in it. It seemed a bit of stretch.





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