I’m a writer, reader, and teacher. I started out as a food writer focused on home cooking, using food as a lens for examining everyday life and relationships. I was interested in people, in how we find and make meaning for ourselves. I still am. My latest book, The Fixed Stars, is a memoir about sexuality, divorce, and motherhood. I wrote it because, in my mid-thirties, nearly a decade into marriage and newly a mother, I lost track of who I was. I wrote because I wanted an answer; in the process, I came to find that I liked the company of questions. The Fixed Stars was published by Abrams Press on August 4, 2020.

Interviews about The Fixed Stars:

I am also the author of A Homemade Life (Simon & Schuster, 2009) and Delancey (Simon & Schuster, 2014). Both were New York Times bestsellers. Before all that, I got my start in 2004 with a blog called Orangette, which won a number of awards, including a 2015 James Beard Foundation Award. The blog is now dormant-ish. I have also written for Bon Appétit, The Washington Post, and Saveur.

I teach workshops on memoir and personal narrative, both online and (in non-pandemic times) all over the US. I also provide mentorship and individual coaching to nonfiction writers of all experience levels.

In a previous lifetime, I co-founded the award-winning Seattle restaurants Delancey and Essex. And last but not at all least: I co-host (with my friend Matthew Amster-Burton) the food-and-comedy podcast Spilled Milk, specializing in dumb jokes and chewing noises since 2010. In 2020, we also made Dire Desires, a limited-series comedy podcast about erotic thrillers, ooh la la.

Wait, actually, one more thing: in recent years, I’ve been learning to garden and grow things, as I enthused about for New York Magazine’s Grub Street Diet.