Bari Weiss of the Wall Street Journal reviews Jessica Fechtor's new memoir “Stir: My Broken Brain and the Meals That Brought Me Home.”

At 28 years old, Jessica Fechtor had everything going for her. She was living in Cambridge, working toward a PhD at Harvard. She had a husband who adored her, friends who crowded around their dinner table and recently completed a half marathon. This woman was the picture of health.

Then one day she went for a jog.

“I was running on the treadmill, when I felt a painless click in my head. There was on odd trickling sensation along my skull like a rolling bead of sweat, but on the inside. Then the room went gray and the earth sucked me down.”

An aneurysm had burst in her brain.

The story of Fechtor’s illness and her remarkable recovery forms the spine of her beautiful new memoir “Stir: My Broken Brain and the Meals That Brought Me Home.”

It’s hard to categorize this book, which for me is one of its chief pleasures.

It’s a book about illness and pain, yes, but it’s also a book about finding work that makes you happy (in the author’s case, leaving grad school to write a food blog), a book about cooking, and a book about the sustaining love of family and friends.

Oh, and there are recipes! Unpretentious ones that made me want to run to the kitchen, like crispy rice and eggs, lemony pasta with mushrooms and peas and whole-wheat banana bread.

I love the way she describes a butter almond cake: “It was a clown car of a cake,” she writes. “My Aunt Fran was in there, her coat flapping in the wind, our city street and a rush of warm air forced up through the subway grates.” 

Baking for the author is so much more than combining flour and butter and sugar and eggs: “You can cook for one,” she writes, “but you bake to share. Baking means you have more than enough: more flour, more butter, more eggs, to make more cake than you need for just you. It means you have something to give away. . . Illness had made me dwell unnaturally on my own body and mind. I wanted to be generous again.”

Generous is a perfect way to describe this author, who writes about her life with vulnerability and courage.