Mark Scarbrough is the author of more than 30 cookbooks, has made countless national television appearances cooking up a storm and laughs, and hosts three successful podcasts. But behind all the food, spotlights, and fun lies a deeper story. Mark has been searching for something his entire life. An adopted kid, he has always been yearning for his birth mother, his purpose, his identity. Starting on the fateful day that he fell out of his world and into what felt like a Texas-based version of The Stepford Wives, Mark heads out into the multiverse of plots on a quest to find out who he really is, leaving behind pulp fiction and using the great Western texts as his ultimately unreliable companions. He now shares that story in his extraordinary new memoir, Bookmarked: How the Great Works of Western Literature F*ucked Up My Life (Propertius Press, September 23, 2021).

Desperate to discover a reality where he makes sense, Mark can hardly distinguish between plots and his life. The child of strict Texas evangelicals, Mark is taught by the Bible to fervently believe in the rapture and second coming and is thus moved to spend his teen years as a youth preacher in cowboy boots. But at college, he discovers William Blake, who teaches him to fall in love with poems, who meets him on a dark road one night as his sanity breaks, and who teaches him that his quest for a real home may lie with his roommate Alex. In a hail-Mary pass, Mark throws his own life at the greatest book of them all, The Bible. He joins a fundamentalist seminary and meets his wife, Miranda. But his marriage won’t stick. It’s not the right plot. So, he makes a new one, nearly pushing his wife off the cliff of sanity in a bid to save his own. In the tradition of beloved titles like The End of Your Life Book Club, Reading Lolita in Tehran, and The Year of Reading Dangerously, Bookmarked tells a deeply personal story through the lens of literature. Except this is not a story about the ways literature can save you. It's about how it can ruin you: how the great works of Western literature shaped, molded, and broke Mark until he found a way to control the voices in his head by his own voice, one made from love and in a true home.

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About the Author

Mark Scarbrough has published 35 cookbooks with his husband, Bruce Weinstein. Bookmarked is the first time he has told his own story through memoir. Scarbrough hosts three successful podcasts, Walking with Dante, the only podcast to slow-walk Dante’s Comedy and Lyric Life, a podcast devoted to the pleasures of lyric poetry. With Bruce Weinstein, he hosts a popular food podcast, Cooking With Bruce and Mark. He also teaches eight-week seminars on Virginia Wolf, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison and leads an international book group of more than 150 committed readers who work through challenging fiction while zoom-sipping wine.

Mark has been featured on outlets like TODAY - NBC, The View, Good Morning, America, NPR’s Morning Edition, Fox and Friends, and The Martha Stewart Show.

For more information visit www.markscarbrough.com and connect with him on Instagram and Facebook.