Discover the Unexpected Joy and Secrets Hidden Within Tanya Bush’s Year of Baking
Luckily, I never had to wonder any of this while reading Tanya Bush’s phenomenal new Will This Make You Happy: Stories & Recipes From a Year of Baking (Chronicle Books; March 2026), a book that is all about the good stuff: life, lust and, most of all, baking. “Baking, like life, is complicated,” Bush, a baker by trade, writes early on; over the course of her book, we observe many ways in which these two things complicate and illuminate each other.
Will This Make You Happy is fundamentally a coming-of-age story in which Bush, who describes herself at the start as “desperate… twenty-three, depressed, unemployed, and adrift” becomes a professional baker, and in the process learns to take responsibility for herself and her desires. What sets Will This Make you Happy apart is its form as a narrative cookbook: a hybrid of personal writing and recipes. While it’s more common lately to include personal narratives in cookbooks, often in recipe lead-ins or in a long introductory chapter, Will This Make You Happy fully integrates the life story and the food story. The narrative action takes place over one very bumpy year and is divided into four seasons. Each season, in turn, has a few chapters of personal narrative and then several recipes, usually for desserts from the preceding narrative.
