At once a traveler's tale, a memoir, and a mouthwatering cookbook, Biting through the Skin offers a first-generation immigrant's perspective on growing up in America's heartland.

"Music was everything to Marcia Butler. Growing up in an emotionally desolate home with an abusive father and a distant mother, she devoted herself completely to the discipline and rigor of the oboe and quickly became a young prodigy on the rise in New York City's competitive music scene. But haunted by troubling childhood memories while balancing the challenges of a busy life as a working musician, she succumbed to dangerous men, drugs, and self-destruction....