Laura Esquivel

LAURA ESQUIVEL

Date of Birth: c. 1951
Birthplace: Mexico
Current Residence: Mexico City, Mexico
Profession: Screenwriter; writer and director for children's theater; and former teacher.

Cooking the recipes that had been passed down to me from my family took me back to the smells of my grandmother's cooking and the smells of my grandmother herself. I thought it would be interesting to bring that phenomenon to literature. Each of us has a history, either personal or national, locked inside us, and the key to unlocking that history is food. In the same way that someone explains to someone how to make a dish, one could narrate a love story.
-Laura Esquivel, People, November 16, 1992

Tita made her entrance into this world, prematurely, right there on the kitchen table amid the smells of simmering noodle soup, thyme, bay leaves, and cilantro, steamed milk, garlic, and of course, onion...Tita was literally washed into this world on a great tide of tears that spilled over the edge of the table and flooded across the kitchen floor.
-Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate

Laura Esquivel has handed us on a silver platter a kind of book which has not previously existed in Latin American literature.
-Elena Poniatowska