Tembi Locke's memoir begins in the specific geography of grief: a Sicilian village, a farmhouse kitchen, and a table where her late husband Saro once sat. From Scratch, this audiobook narrated by Locke herself, covers the three summers she spent in Sicily with her daughter Zoela after Saro's death, returning to the small farming community that had once refused to accept her. The writing moves between past and present with the ease of someone who has lived long enough inside a story to understand its full shape, and hearing Locke read it in her own voice adds a layer that no studio production could manufacture.
What makes From Scratch unusual among grief memoirs is its insistence on the concrete. Locke does not deal in abstraction. She deals in fresh tomatoes, in her suocera's hands that once held her at arm's length learning to hold her close, in the specific smell of Sicilian earth in summer. The Netflix adaptation introduced this story to a wider audience, but the audiobook carries something the screen cannot fully convey: the texture of Locke's actual voice, with all its hesitations and recoveries intact. This is a different kind of document from the dramatization.
What Tembi Locke Delivers
From Scratch works because Locke refuses to sentimentalize her own experience. The love story between her and Saro is genuinely romantic, the meeting in Florence, the years of building a life in Los Angeles, the adoption of their daughter Zoela. But it is never prettied up. Saro's illness is described with clinical frankness alongside emotional devastation, and the resistance of his Sicilian family to an American Black actress is rendered with specificity rather than used as a simple villain arc. The memoir earns its resolution because it shows the reader exactly what it cost.
Locke is also, it should be said, a genuinely skilled prose writer. There are passages here about what it means to be nourished by another culture, to find yourself welcomed at a table you once considered hostile, that have the quality of the best food writing. Think of Ruth Reichl at her most emotionally open, or Gabrielle Hamilton's Blood, Bones and Butter, but with a dimension of loss running underneath that gives even the lightest meals a shadow. The Sicilian food scenes are not ornamental; each dish in the suocera's kitchen carries the weight of a relationship being rebuilt from scratch, in the literal and figurative sense the title claims.
The structure of the memoir is worth noting because Locke handles it so well in audio form. The three Sicilian summers provide the outer frame, and within each summer, flashbacks reach back to the beginning of the love story and forward through its arc. That movement between timelines could be disorienting in a lesser narrator's hands, but Locke signals the transitions through tone rather than announcement, letting her voice soften or sharpen as the emotional register shifts. The result is a memoir that reads as simultaneous rather than sequential, past and present held in tension throughout rather than laid out chronologically.
What Tembi Locke Gets Right
Self-narrated memoirs live or die on whether the author actually sounds like themselves, as opposed to someone performing a stage version of themselves. Locke passes this test completely. Her voice is warm and unhurried. She takes her time with the Sicilian scenes in a way that suggests real sensory memory rather than description from notes. When she reads the passages about Saro's final months, the restraint in her delivery is more affecting than any production choice a studio narrator might have made. Grief this quiet is harder to fake than grief that announces itself.
The audiobook runs just over ten hours, which is the right length for this kind of memoir. It does not overstay. The Sicilian sections alternate with flashback sequences tracing the love story from its Florence beginning, and Locke paces these transitions well in performance, using slight tonal shifts to signal the change in time without anything as blunt as a chapter announcement requiring interruption. Listeners who have watched the Netflix series will notice both how the adaptation compressed the timeline and how the memoir's slower pace reveals dimensions the show could not accommodate.
The Italian-language reviews accompanying this edition offer their own testimony to the book's reach across cultures. One Italian reader noted that the book went beyond the film in communicating the emotional reality behind the events, which is exactly what the memoir format is designed to achieve. In audio, that depth is even more accessible because Locke's voice carries cultural nuance, including her relationship to Italian language and Sicilian custom, that the printed page can only approximate.
Where Tembi Locke Loses Some Ground
Listeners who come to this expecting the emotional pacing of the Netflix series may find the audiobook slower and more interior. The show condenses and dramatizes; the memoir stays in Locke's head and on the Sicilian table. That interiority is a feature, not a flaw, but it means the audiobook rewards patience rather than binge listening. Take it in extended sessions and you get the cumulative weight the writing is designed to build.
The book's resolution is not a clean healing narrative. Locke does not arrive at the end of three Sicilian summers having put her grief behind her. What she arrives at is a relationship with grief that allows her to carry it rather than be crushed by it, and a relationship with Saro's family that transforms from obstacle into anchor. That distinction matters for setting expectations. This is a book about learning to live alongside loss rather than overcoming it.
Who Should Pick Up From Scratch
Readers drawn to memoirs about love, loss, and the way food connects us to the people we have lost will find this essential. It belongs on the same shelf as Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and Nigel Slater's Toast, different in texture but similar in the precision with which grief is handled. Those who loved the Netflix adaptation and want more of Locke's interiority will get exactly that. Listeners looking for a fast-paced narrative or a neat healing arc may find the deliberate pace challenging. This is a book that sits with difficulty rather than resolving it quickly, and it is better for that choice.
Before You Press Play
- Read by: Tembi Locke narrates her own memoir with the kind of lived authority no hired voice could replicate; grief, warmth, and quiet humor are all present in the same breath.
- At its heart: Grief and rebuilding, cross-cultural love, food as healing
- Vibe: Tender and luminous, occasionally devastating
- Short version: A memoir that earns every tear it asks for, made essential by Locke's own voice telling the story exactly as it happened.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Tembi Locke narrate this audiobook herself?
Yes, Locke narrates From Scratch in her own voice, which gives the memoir an intimacy no studio narrator could achieve. Her self-narration is one of the strongest arguments for choosing the audiobook over the print edition.
Do I need to have watched the Netflix series before listening to this audiobook?
No prior viewing is needed. The audiobook stands entirely on its own, and in many ways offers a fuller picture than the adaptation because it stays closer to Locke's inner experience and the specific details of her time in Sicily.
Is From Scratch primarily a food memoir or a grief memoir?
It is both, and the two are inseparable. Food functions as the concrete expression of grief, healing, and cultural reconnection throughout the book. Readers who enjoy either genre will find the audiobook rewarding.
How does From Scratch handle the cross-cultural family conflict?
Locke addresses the Sicilian family's initial rejection with honesty and without reducing it to caricature. The eventual reconciliation is earned through years of actual relationship-building, which the memoir traces carefully rather than rushing to resolution.
