How Adam Roberts' Life as a Food Writer Influenced his First Novel
A 20-year career helped him channel the persona of his main character, Isabella Pasternak, who wants to be a food writer, in Food Person
Adam Roberts had lots of career material for his first novel. That’s because his diverse writing career includes:
Starting The Amateur Gourmet food blog in 2004
Becoming the author of two books: The Amateur Gourmet: How to Chop, Shop, and Tablehop Like a Pro (Almost); and Secrets of the Best Chefs, for which he cooked with 50 chefs
Writing for a television sitcom called The Real O’Neals.
Currently he’s a Substack newsletter writer. (All his old posts and recipes are still available on his website, however.)
And now he can add “novelist” to his list of writing accomplishments. His debut novel, Food Person, follows Isabella Pasternak, a twenty-something aspiring food writer who takes a job ghostwriting a cookbook for Molly Babcock, a celebrity actor who’s fallen on hard times.
It’s a fun, fast read with lots of insider food world details, including how Melissa Clark and Julia Turshen started out as ghostwriters. It lists cookbooks Isabella loves, including The Zuni Café Cookbook by Judy Rodgers and The Breakfast Book by Marion Cunningham. And she names her heroes: Ruth Reichl, Edna Lewis, Gabrielle Hamilton and Nigel Slater. Could these be Adam’s heroes too? Makes sense.
In the novel, Isabella steps into a new writing career when she ghostwrites a cookbook for a celebrity. How does she do? Adam has the real-life experience to explain: “By the time Friday rolled around, Isabella had accomplished the impossible: she’d made it to seventy rough headnotes, with only five left to go.” She’s an overachiever, clearly!
As a perk of being a paid subscriber, you can win a copy of Food Person. Entries are open to readers in the U.S. and Canada. Leave a comment below or at the end. I’ll pick the winner using Random.org.
Here’s Adam on what he’s learned in his long career, and why he wanted to write a novel:
Q. You’ve been writing about food since the early 2000s. Why did you want to move from non-fiction into a novel?
A. I went to grad school for playwriting at NYU (New York University). I have always written plays, screenplays, fiction, and I wrote for TV for a while. In the past few years, I decided to merge the two worlds of food writing. Food Person is my most autobiographical, write-what-you-know work.
Q. How was your experience of writing fiction?
A. I loved it! It felt very liberating, because under the veil of fiction, you can write about anything. Even though there are real food writers in the book, I got to imbue the fiction characters with my thoughts about the food world.