When Naomi Hart flew from Sydney to New York to study musical theatre as a twenty-two year-old, she planned to be away for only two years. Little did she know that two years would eventually turn into eight and much of it would be spent working for the New York Mafia...
As a young uni student Naomi flew from Australia to New York to make it on Broadway as a musical theatre actor. In the process she accidentally ended up working for the New York Mafia, performed as a dancing plate in the musical 'Beauty and the Beast', married a talented but highly temperamental chef, opened the famous Hartsyard restaurant and bar in Sydney, lived on an island in Fiji and, after discovering her eldest daughter had autism, lost all her hair to stress and became devoted to water polo.
Her memoir, Life at the Bottom of the Blender, has it all. Written with warmth and passion, not to mention an enormous dose of quirky humour, Naomi outlines her crazy life that has seen her cheered by US audiences, spat on by rude restaurant customers, lived in buildings where dead bodies were routinely discovered, unsuspectingly married a man whose talent as a chef was only slightly marred by his ADHD, fought for and won a green card to the US, opened a restaurant of her own in Sydney while nursing a toddler and pregnant with her second child, wrote a bestselling cookbook, lived and worked on a beautiful island resort in Fiji and then, after Covid sent her family scuttling back to Sydney to deal with lockdowns and home-schooling, gradually realised that her life was too much... even for her. It is a truly fabulous, entertaining and uplifting story. You couldn't make it up. An enormously enjoyable read.
