When butter is deadly and eggs can make your throat swell shut, cupcakes and other joys of childhood seem out of the question. So Sandra-s mother used to warn guests against a toxic, frosting-tinged kiss with -Don-t kill the birthday girl!- Tackling a long-marginalized subject, this book intertwines a cultural history and sociological study of food allergies with humorous, sometimes heartbreaking real-life experience. From a short-lived gig as a restaurant reviewer to the dates that ended with trips to the emergency room, step inside the story of a modern young woman coming to terms with a potentially deadly disorder.

The Boston Globe said \"In this charming book, part memoir and part handbook, poet Sandra Beasley forthrightly casts herself and others with serious food allergies as \'people who-for better or for worse-experience the world in a slightly different way.\' Beasley is a warm and lively guide to the quirky world of allergies, demonstrating on page after page that this \'is not the story of how we [the allergic] die-[but] the stories of how we live.\'\"

Sandra Beasley is also the author of I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in such venues as the 2010 Beast American Poetry, Slate, and The Believer; her prose has appeared in Psychology Today and the Washington Post Magazine. She lives in Washington, D.C., where she serves on the Board of the Writer\'s Center.