Write it down, I say to her, if you don't want to say it, write it down. In that notebook I gave you, where you promised to write your recipes. Why don't you write your own story? What you really think. Write it all out.
       'Why should I?' Mara says. 'Why should I say anything? You know what I think. You are my children. No need to say anything.'

But there is a need, and Yahp feels it acutely as she moves between her life in Sydney, Paris, and Kuala Lumpur. How to gather the stories she wants from her rich and reticent multiracial heritage before it changes forever? How to reveal the past when its traces are contained in cooking utensils for food without recipes, in cracks papered over or in objects abandoned for reasons now lost? Eat First, Talk Later ranges widely across the region's long and troubled history and politics, its gloriously multifaceted culture, each segment vivid and packed with information.

'Eat First, Talk Later ranges widely across the region's long and troubled history and politics'

This is also a book about writing a book. We watch Yahp nutting out various drafts, jotting down scraps of talk, writing her version of her parents' lives, driving through the traffic of the Peninsula, managing her turbulent love life and episodes of activism in Sydney and Kuala Lumpur over meals and good talk – concocting what her publisher's media release calls 'a non-stop literary feast' – all skilfully weighted like a brilliant patchwork – each narrative thread, I would guess, leading Yahp to others, each impossible to let go of in case the whole should unravel.

Her frankness is disarming. She is willing to share the torments of memoir-writing. At the halfway mark, she confesses:

I've caved under the weight of this story I'm trying to tell – there are too many memories, too many smaller stories, too much history, too much life to be captured, and never enough to be true. I haven't yet found my voice – the one to carry this story. I haven't found Mara's voice, or Peter's, or Jing's or anyone else who matters – a voice that is theirs as well as mine.

Beth Yahp

I read Yahp's début novel, The Crocodile Fury (1992), with pleasure when it first appeared, a fantasia filled with demons and wonders and ghosts, plus a crocodile stalking the ever-encroaching jungle. The voice, very much her own, was mediated through a grandmother with an extra eye. But fiction lets you invent and lie and riff on the supernatural – which gets you off the hook in a way memoir doesn't. Yahp's memoir rings true because she brings her difficulties into the narrative, treading gently around family and friends who look over her shoulder offering different perceptions.

This is part of the writing process, I tell my students. You can't be sure the something will ever arrive in its fullness ... So you try to remember that what you feel, and where the feeling comes from, matters. No matter what your 'inner critic' or anyone around you says. No matter who's angry, affronted or afraid – even you.

But the writing process is also about letting go, cutting back, juggling a large cast of characters, past and present, keeping the reader engrossed, wanting more not less of the frightening, funny multiracial world that has made her. Hearing about food is not the same as eating it and, regrettably, lovers Jing in KL and Matt in Sydney remain faceless and shadowy.

This is a book that has been a long time in the making. Along the way it morphed into a doctoral thesis in Creative Arts, and it has been published by Vintage bearing some of the signs. There is a glossary, a bibliography, a long list of references, a multitude of acknowledgments – all very fine, but an index is needed rather more.

Travellers through the Malay Peninsula will welcome this portrait of a country which is so much more than an exotic hub, where the tourists usually skim over the surface, rave about the food, complain about the traffic, and depart. Those aspiring memoir-writers fortunate enough to be in Yahp's writing classes will find solace and much to emulate.