RottenKid: A Succulent Story of Survival Slated for March 12, 2024, Release
(Grass Valley, CA) – Sibylline Press is honored to announce it has signed Brigit Binns to its growing cadre of brilliant women over 50 writers. In Binns’ coming-of-age memoir, RottenKid: A Succulent Story of Survival, she reveals how simultaneous privilege and profound neglect led this author of multiple cookbooks—many of them for Williams-Sonoma—to seek comfort in the kitchen.
Binns takes the reader through Hollywood dysfunction against the backdrop of old California, as viewed by her small, insecure self through coke-bottle glasses. When her parents eventually divorce, her actor father (Edward Binns, 12 Angry Men, Patton, North by Northwest) flees and her mother sends Brigit off to boarding school so that she can more easily conduct her decades-long romance with a married California Governor. Brigit is thrilled to escape her mother’s critical eye, racking up seven schools and a host of bad decisions before the age of 16 and finally decamping to college out of state.
Beginning with mom’s “life-altering” cheese souffle, food was the only catalyst for rare moments of détente in what would become a lifelong destructive—and often incendiary—relationship (in one chilling instance, her mother briefly shoves a .22 rifle into 15-year-old Binns’ belly).
A memoir sauteed in Hollywood stories, world travel, and the ever-present hunger to belong, Binns’ story is a tribute to female resilience and an inspiration for those dealing with the catastrophic damage that a narcissistic parent can inflict.
About Brigit Binns: Brigit’s cookbook Sunset Magazine‘s Eating up the West Coast was her 29th book. She’s helped some of the U.S.A.’s most respected chefs, like New York’s Michael Psilakis and Los Angeles’ Joachim Splichal, turn their cookbook dreams into reality. During the 10 years she lived in Europe, Brigit graduated from England’s Tante Marie Cooking School, lived and catered in Spain, and edited the Costa del Sol’s English-language magazine. She now lives full-time in California’s Central Coast wine country with her two dogs and fabulous husband Casey, (aka the Wine Spectator-award-winning “Paso Wine Man”).
ROTTENKID by Brigit Binns | 03-12-2024 | Tradepaper | ISBN: 978-1-960573-99-5 | Memoir
Sibylline Press publishes the work of brilliant women over 50, exclusively. It is distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West. Sibylline Press takes its name from the Sibylline Books, the ancient writings of wise older women, the Sibyls. More at sibyllinepress.com.