"The thing I keep repeating is that I’m not a group-living guru," says Lola Milholland. 

The Portland noodle company CEO and author is discussing things people frequently say about her hybrid memoir cookbook Group Living and Other Recipes. “I don’t think group living is a solution to housing inequality or inequity. It’s a tactic for financial survival; it’s also a way to expand as a human. It doesn’t solve the housing crisis.”

Milholland is the multicultural daughter of non-monogamous Portland hippies. (Her mother worked in natural food business management, and her father ran a number of esoteric publications—so they were hippies’ hippies.) She grew up in a home where she sometimes had to give up her room to visiting Tibetan monks and sleep on the couch in the living room. 

Yet, in all of Group Living’s stories the home is sturdy. In fact, it’s warm, lively, and brimming with comfort. “Guests, dinners, strangers—these were nothing to be fearful about, nor overly prepared for” she writes in the book’s opening chapter. “The house had extra rooms, and it was no sweat to cook extra food.” 

That chapter ends with a recipe for her mother’s “Garlicky Panfried Pasta,” made from leftover pasta from larger meals, which is panfried “until the noodles crisped on their edges, creating contrasting crunchy and chewy textures.”

Group Living has a deceptively simple book structure: It’s short stories, told mostly chronologically—jumping around in time, here and there, to add backstory. Near the end of each chapter there’s a recipe or two, adding a little more character.

Though she had an interesting youth, Milholland doesn’t luxuriate in it—thus escaping one of the genre’s most contemptible habits. Instead, by the second chapter, we find her 21 years old and living in Kyoto, Japan. The adventures and impressions of adult life are fully underway. 

Thanks to a Portland Public Schools immersion program, Milholland studied Japanese for 15 years before she found herself living abroad, but still feels alienated when her first host family leaves her to eat dinner alone. 

The second host family is a better fit, cooking with her and teaching her Japanese onomatopoeia words that are more about sensation than subject. She explains: “’Crunchy’ has many translations: shaki shaki for a texture like biting into celery or daikon; saku saku for a crispy feeling on the teeth, like crunching on cookies or apples; pari pari for the crunch of something freshly fried.”

Milholland really knows her way around sentences about food, which is less surprising when we learn she was an editor at a now defunct nonprofit magazine Edible Portland from 2007-2014. The nonprofit magazine’s focus on the ecology, politics, farm workers, and Indigenous populations informed her own food views, but she argues that Edible Portland wasn’t ahead of its time. Anyone who thinks so has simply forgotten the movements that came before.

Group Living knows where it draws from. It pulls its form from what Milholland originally set out to make: a commune cookbook. You have perhaps seen these before; they’re generally worn, hand-written, and adorned with some sort of root vegetable on the cover. Commune cookbooks are special because, like a grandparent’s collection of recipes, there are always extra stories scribbled in the margins.

“It was gonna be a giant zine—a COVID cookbook. In so many commune cookbooks there’s weird recipes in there, but there’s also ruminations on things you wouldn’t expect: little essays, instructions for how to do things that have nothing to do with cooking,” Milholland says.

Over time, residencies, queries, and editors, Milholland’s idea for a giant food zine became a work of creative nonfiction. She didn’t anticipate Group Living’s final book form, but it’s hard to imagine a better fit for the zeitgeist right now than: unusual memoir and evocative food writing meets fun and easy recipe guide.

Milholland has not written a glowing portrait of communal life—unless you see a halo in Cantaloupe-Seed Horchata. She has however written a pleasantly pragmatic book about the hardships and rewards of getting along with others and the joys found in cooking together. “Throughout all of history, humans have had a hard time living with one another,” she says. “But we totally need each other. Our lives are richer when they’re tangled up with one another.”