There are moments in the best memoirs that are deeply confessional, as you’d expect, but not in a self-indulgent way. Instead they provide the gift of vulnerability to which readers connect. These memoirs allow us in, not only to the writer’s life but our own. Annie Smithers’ Kitchen Sentimental is just that.

Annie has been a part of the Victorian culinary scene for at least 30 years. Her connections to Stephanie Alexander and Ella Wolf-Taska are among those that shaped her. Today she cooks at the acclaimed du Fermier in the central Victorian town of Trentham. From a place of relative calm and with the benefit of years, this book is a recollection of the restaurants in which Annie has worked, the moments of vocation and others of despair. Along the way she observes the fragility that marks her and the dysfunction that often drives the world of fine dining and those who inhabit it.

It was during Annie’s stint at Pearl, one of Melbourne’s most hyped openings of 2000, that her world came crashing down. Physically ill and emotionally spent, she retreated with a sense of personal and professional failure. Only decades later is she able to write this:

“Pearl made me realise that I would never, ever be a great chef. I will never reach the heights of those I look up to. It also made me realise that I didn’t want to be that person. The sense of exactness, the quest for perfection, the excruciating discipline that it takes is not for me. It is too intense; it breaks me. Over twenty years on, I am incredibly happy to be cooking food that leaves people with a sense of nourishment and love as opposed to impressing the pants of them. At times, I look around at my peers in a star-gazing way and wish to be them. I’ll try and cook something uber fancy, which will inevitably disappoint me, and I will go back to my ways, reminding myself that what I do makes a lot of people happy and I am enough as I am. I don’t need to be anyone else, and I should jolly well stop wanting to be.”

“I am enough as I am.” I suspect such ‘resignation’ will never fire the flames of greatness in any world, culinary or otherwise. Perhaps, though, it enables a life lived well and with love, and that is more than enough.