Linda Ronstadt encountered a pivotal problem when she teamed up with former New York Times writer Lawrence Downes to pen a cookbook featuring some of her family’s favorite recipes.

“It didn’t come together because I don’t cook!” said Ronstadt, 76, a National Medal of Arts recipient, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee and 11-time Grammy Award-winner.

“So, we decided to turn it into a book about the Sonoran desert and how it’s strikingly the same on either side (Mexico and the U.S.), even though they put that border fence in the middle of it.”

The result is “Feels Like Home: Song for the Sonoran Borderlands,” which will be published Oct. 4 by Heyday and sometimes reads like several books intertwined into one.

Enhanced by the vivid photography of Bill Stein, a longtime Ronstadt friend, “Feels Like Home” is a celebration of culture, music, geography, food and family ties that know no borders. It is eloquently told by a singer who has devoted much of her career to transcending musical borders, from country, rock and jazz standards to Broadway musicals, opera and the Mexican folklorico music she grew up singing in Arizona with her family in Tucson.

The book — about which more in a moment — inspired a companion album of the same name, due out Friday from Putamayo World Records, curated by Ronstadt and Putamayo founder Dan Storper.

The 10-song collection features songs performed by her and such past and present musical pals as Lalo Guerrero, Jackson Browne, Emmylou Harris, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos and members of the Bay Area-based Mexican folk music group Los Cenzontles (The Mockingbirds).

“We worked on the album for many months because we wanted to make sure it was what Linda wanted,” Putamayo honcho Storper said.

“The CD includes a 24-page booklet with photos, some excerpts from her book and her comments about each of the songs. The way Linda expresses herself is the heart and soul of who she is.”

Luminous voice silenced

Hearing Ronstadt’s luminous voice in full flight on the “Feels Like Home” compilation album will likely be an emotional experience for many listeners.

Her final concert was a 2009 performance of songs from her Mariachi music-celebrating 1987 release, “Canciones de Mi Padre” (“Songs of My Father”), the top-selling non-English language album in U.S. history. She made her last recording, a collaboration with Ry Cooder and The Chieftains, in 2010.

Ronstadt was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2012. Her condition was rediagnosed in 2019 as also having progressive supranuclear palsy, an incurable degenerative disease.

Under either name, her singing career came to an abrupt end and her life was profoundly changed. Previously simple tasks, such as eating or brushing her teeth, are now challenges that require considerable concentration for this genre-leaping vocal legend. Walking is difficult and she uses hearing aids, although she attributes the latter simply as a sign of growing old.

“I can always harmonize in my head, even without music playing,” Ronstadt said, speaking by phone from her San Francisco home. “That’s all I can do. I can’t sing.”

Happily, her voice rings loud and clear on nearly every page of “Feels Like Home,” which was both a labor of love and a labor.

“I can’t type,” she said matter-of-factly.

“That’s another reason I needed a lot of help with this book. I have a lot of involuntary moments because of Parkinson’s and progressive supranuclear palsy. So, it was slow going. It wasn’t this bad when I was writing (her 2013 memoir) ‘Simple Dreams,’ because my condition wasn’t as advanced as it is now.”

Downes, the co-author of “Feels Like Home,” elaborated on Ronstadt’s condition in an interview from his New York home on Long Island.

“Linda can type, but very slowly and her fingers tremble,” he said. “She has an iPad and a MacBook that she types on, but it’s hard for her.”

Writing side by side

Even so, Ronstadt was completely hands on as she and Downes wrote and honed “Feels Like Home” side by side in her San Francisco home.

“I wasn’t ghostwriting or taking dictation. It’s her story and she wrote it in her voice,” he said.

“We went over the manuscript multiple times. I had my laptop and she had a print-out in a three-ring binder. We went through it page by page, and then we’d do it again — and again.

“I was never with her in the recording studio. But based on everything I’ve heard, the way she did this book is very similar to how she made records. She’s very particular about her singing voice and her written voice. She could have been a great writer.”

Does Ronstadt envision doing another book?

“No!” she said. “It’s too hard.”

While “Feels Like Home’s” focus goes far beyond culinary matters, including some heartfelt political commentary, the book does features 20 of Ronstadt’s favorite family recipes. They range from traditional Sonoran cheese soup and chiltepin salsa to carne asada and a more contemporary dish called tunapenos, which are jalepenos stuffed with tuna.

“I learned about them from my sister-in-law, Jackie. ‘What is this gringo food?’ I asked her. I was just shocked,” Ronstadt writes of her first encounter tunapenos. “And then I ate one and I went: ‘Okay, I am eating up the whole plate.’”

Letter to the pope

The book also includes a chapter entitled “Wait a Minute, Your Holiness,” which recounts the letter she and her friend, Reverend Mary Moreno-Richardson, sent to Pope Francis seven years ago.

“When I learned in 2015 that Pope Francis had apologized to Indigenous peoples for the brutal harm done to them by the Catholic Church in colonial times but was also about to canonize the Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra, one of the brutalizers, the dissonance was too much to bear,” she writes.

The letter concludes: “Our concern is that to canonize him would not only be an affront to the California Indians that survive, it would tarnish the images of the saints we cherish. We implore you to reconsider the canonization of Junípero Serra.”

Serra was indeed canonized later in 2015. Did Ronstadt expect Pope Francis to respond to her written plea?

“I’m sure he never saw my letter,” she said. “But I felt I needed to write it no matter and put it in the book.”

Ronstadt sputtered good-naturedly when asked if she was no longer a practicing Catholic.

“I’m a practicing atheist,” Ronstadt said. “But I like this pope and I think he would do more if he could. I think he’d let priests marry and would (OK) gay marriage.”

The subject of indigenous peoples is near and dear to her heart.

Ronstadt’s grandfather, Federico Jose Maria Ronstadt, was born in the Sonoran town of Banamichi. He migrated to her hometown of Tucson — about 200 miles to the north — in the early 1880s.

Her new 218-page memoir is a valentine to her family and the Mexican heritage she has long celebrated in words and music.

Growing up, Ronstadt and her family traveled often and freely between southern Arizona and northern Mexico. The physical landscape was the same on either side of the border and so were many of the people.

“For me,” Ronstadt writes in “Mi Pueblo,” “Feels Like Home’s” fourth chapter, “Spanish was the language you got scolded and praised in, and the language you sang in. Since I always sang in Spanish, it was always more natural for me to sing it than to speak it.”