Trying to remember this book that I read ages ago (like 15-20ish years) but google and chatGPT aren't helping at all and I'm beginning to feel like I hallucinated it
Key features I remember:
The book:
The story seems to start as a generic romancey book where a woman is on a date and goes to eat a tomato but it is flavourless
She wakes up from a medically induced coma, only to find the man she had been dreaming about was her surgeon who is a lot less charismatic than he was in her dream, but she still finds herself drawn to him
She can't remember how she ended up in a coma, and her friends tell her that it was in a crash of some sort - i dont remember if it was a car or a plane
She knows she was a food critic, and has now lost her sense of taste because of the accident, which has basically ruined her career because a food critic who cant taste isnt reliable.
And she can't figure out why her ex is constantly giving her the cold shoulder until her friend tells her she gave his restaurant that he tried to start up a 2 star rating, which condemned it to not get any customers because a 1 star would draw people who wanted to see if it really was that bad, and a 3 star would have drawn people looking for an average safe ground, but a 2 star rating from someone like her signalled "dont bother."
At some point, she encounters her doctor's father, who (I think) was a tomato grower, though I'm not 100% sure on this detail and gradually gets to know him and falls in love with him because while he doesnt look like her doctor, his personality is almost everything dream-doctor was
He teaches her that even though she cant taste properly any more, she can still enjoy the textures, like a tomato exploding in her mouth and enjoy the tingle of the citrus and seeds
I dont know if it was during this point or after a bit more soul searching, she bites into a tomato when she is starting to get her life back on track while she is with the tomato guy and the flavour explodes and she gets her sense of taste back.
Book vibes:
Im pretty sure it was a paperback. I was in highschool and my mum had borrowed it off a friend but she doesn't remember the book at all
I feel like the first part of it where she woke up was set in the US maybe? And the part where she got her sense of taste back was in Italy
It felt like a cross between a memoir and a romance, but without any sex scenes as far as I can recall. More like a slow-burn discovering yourself patient romance
Does anyone know this book or am I mixing up two different ones like GPT suggested, or is it just some crazy hallucinated memory?