The title gives me the heebie-jeebies, but the ecstatic reviews made me want to read Blood, Bones & Butter (Random House, $26) anyway. This is the memoir of New York City chef Gabrielle Hamilton, who owns Prune in the East Village, and it takes up where in-your-face culinary memoirs like Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential leave off.

We learn, for example, that 17-year-old Hamilton worked as a waitress at NYC’s Lone Star Cafe (in my old neighborhood, by the way) where she scammed the till by submitting dupe checks and then spent most of the $90,000 she earned in a single year on drugs. (Her being underage and serving liquor put Lone Star Cafe at legal risk in turn – and saved Hamilton from being charged with grand larceny.) She shoplifted, lied about everything, dropped out of college more than once and worked for weasely New York caterers who served old and factory-produced food in place of the dainty menu ordered up and paid for by brides’ mothers.

But much like Jeannette Walls, author and subject of the unflinching The Glass Castle (a non-restaurant-world memoir), Hamilton has managed to rise above her background. She practiced nose-to-tail cookery well before it became a trend, and – ta-da! – she recently won the 2011 James Beard Award for Best Chef/NYC.

This book is so well written (Hamilton went on to receive an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan), so intensely described, so scary-honest that I have a sense of bearing personal witness. Her misadventures – and I use that word ironically – will take your breath away. If you are a parent, your heart may break for this child set loose into the world by the divorce of her self-absorbed parents. It’s true that Hamilton does not yet have all of her issues and relationships neatly resolved. But, then, who does?

There are many, many chef memoirs on Amazon.com these days. If you are going to read just one, choose this one. It will stick like a chicken bone in your memory.