Crave

**Christine O'Brien remembers growing up in NYC's famous Dakota apartment with her powerful father, her beautiful mother, and a food obsessesion that consumed her.**

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Hunger comes in many forms. A person can crave a steak in the same way that she can crave a perfect family life. In her memoir, *Crave: A Memoir of Food and Longing* , Christine O’Brien tells the story of her own cravings. It’s a story of growing up in a family with a successful, but explosive father, a beautiful, but damaged, mother and three brothers in New York City’s famed Dakota apartment building. Christine’s father was Ed Scherick, the ABC television executive and film producer who created ABC’s *Wide World of Sports* as well as classic films like *The Taking of Pelham One Two Three* and *The Heartbreak* *Kid*. Her mother, Carol, was raised on a farm in Missouri.

With chestnut hair and the all-American good looks that won her the title of Miss Missouri and a finalist place in The Miss America Contest she looked to be the perfect wife and mother. But, Carol had a craving that was almost impossible to fill.

Seriously injured in a farming accident when she was a girl, she craved health even though doctors told her that she was perfectly fine. Setting out on a journey through the quacks of the East Coast, she began seeing a doctor who prescribed “The Program” as a way to health for her and her family. At first she ate nothing but raw liver and drank shakes made with fresh yeast. Then it was blended salads, the forerunner of the smoothie. And that was all she let her family eat.

This well-meant tyranny of the dinner table led Christine to her own cravings for family, for food and for the words to tell the story of her hunger. *Crave* is that story—the chronicle of a writer’s painful and ultimately satisfying awakening.