A Conversation with Adam Roberts
Celebrating His Debut Novel, Food Person
Ron Block has been raving about this buzzy debut novel — Food Person by Adam Roberts. Friends & Fiction brings you lots of household name authors on the regular. But we also love that sense of discovery, of introducing a fresh, new voice. Since the show’s inception in 2020, we’ve loved hearing from so many viewers, listeners, and community members about how F&F has broadened their reading horizons, forced us to read outside our comfort zones, and read authors we had never heard of before. What better way to foster that sense of discovery than to bring you an author’s brand-new, first-ever novel?
Meet Adam Roberts. Host of the podcast Lunch Therapy and a food blogger for two decades, Adam started The Amateur Gourmet blog which led to a book by the same name. He has also authored two other works of non-fiction, Secrets of the Best Chefs, and Give My Swiss Chards to Broadway. Food Person is Adam’s first novel.
If you loved Alison Espach’s The Wedding People and Dolly Alderton’s Good Material, you will adore this delectable comedy of manners about cooking, ambition, and friendship set in the food world as a young and socially awkward writer takes a job ghostwriting the cookbook for a famous (and famously chaotic) Hollywood starlet.
Welcome, Adam! And thank, you, Ron for calling this fun, new book to our attention!
Adam, congratulations on the release of your delicious debut novel, Food Person. It is fabulously written and so much fun! Let’s start by having you tell me the 5 words that best describe your book.
Thank you so much! (I hope those words don’t count.)
1. Juicy
2. Playful
3. Heartfelt
4. Entertaining
5. Yummy
Tell us what the book is about, but also in true Friends & Fiction tradition, tell us what the book is REALLY about.
Well on a surface level, the book is about an aspiring food writer in her twenties who takes a job ghostwriting a celebrity’s cookbook.
What it’s REALLY about are the necessary compromises one has to make in order to pursue your artistic dreams. Isabella is as passionate about cookbooks as can be; she collects them, she reveres them. For her to denigrate herself by writing a celebrity’s cookbook is as low as she can imagine going.
And yet, so many of her heroes have ghostwritten celebrity cookbooks. If it’s good enough for Melissa Clark, why isn’t it good enough for a twenty-something nobody?
What brought you to writing a novel, and what was the spark of idea that led you to write this particular story? Describe what it’s like to release your first book baby into the world.
I’ve always wanted to write a novel and heaven knows I’ve tried and failed many times.
The spark of the idea for this one came from a real life experience: I was asked to ghostwrite a celebrity’s cookbook! Unlike Isabella, I immediately took the job. Also unlike Isabella, I worked with a totally lovely celebrity who must remain nameless because I signed an NDA.
At some point, after that experience, I thought: “What if that celebrity had been a monster? What if they’d hated food? What if they were only writing a cookbook to resuscitate their career?” And thus Food Person was born.
Seeing it out there in the world is beyond a dream-come-true. I never thought I would pull it together enough to finish a novel, and to have finished one and sold it to Knopf? I’m still getting over the shock.
Your characters are written so vividly and with a great deal of relatable humor and reality. How did you bring Isabella and Molly to life on the page? Their pairing and journey are riveting.
Thanks!
Well first I came up with Isabella who’s an embodiment of all my most anti-social tendencies. She’s introverted, standoffish, a bit snobby, and totally unwilling to deal with that annoying biological phenomenon known as “people.”
Then, when I knew she would take a job with a celebrity, I thought: who would be most likely to push Isabella’s buttons? To force her out of her comfort zone? Molly is in-your-face, uncouth, disrespectful, and wildly social.
And then there’s the food layer: Isabella is so passionate about what she’s going to eat, she could spend a whole day planning what she’s going to cook for dinner. Molly, on the other hand, sees food as her mortal enemy: the less she has to think about it, the better.
So these dichotomies naturally animated the characters and made their conflicts a joy to write.
I’m a huge cookbook nerd, so it was such a delight to see so many favorite titles and writers show up throughout the book. Tell us about your history with cookbooks, the fabulous restaurants, and especially the food porn!
I am a total cookbook junkie. Right now in my house, I have stacks of cookbooks on a coffee table in the den, more stacks under the stairs, more in my kitchen, and that doesn’t even include the ones I have filed away on bookshelves. To me, cookbooks are magical portals into the sights and smells of other cultures, other time periods, and — most fascinating of all — other people’s kitchens.
My collection runs the gambit from Uta Hagen’s Love for Cooking to The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Cookbook. I could spend hours in a cookbook store; in fact, that would be my dream afternoon.
As for the restaurants, I had fun making up trendy New York restaurants, like “Snakebite” which plays a pivotal role in the story. I modeled them after those places that open that everyone’s talking about one minute and that everyone’s moved on from in the next.
Food porn wise, that’s literally been my bread and butter (har har) for twenty years, ever since I started my food blog The Amateur Gourmet.
It’s always so interesting to our readers to hear about the process of a writer. Did you outline the entire book before putting it together or just let the story and characters come to you as you wrote?
My dirty secret is that I wrote a whole novel before this that I didn’t show anyone where I let the story and characters come to me as I wrote… and it was a disaster!
Turns out not everyone can do that.
This one I outlined as much as I possibly could; breaking the story into three acts (similar to a screenplay) and I mapped out the arcs of the characters and all the beats beforehand. Turns out, that’s what works best for me.
Your work covers so much territory: friendship, career choices, family drama, and self-esteem. Are these plot points from your own experiences?
Oh, I think they have to be, though I’m not always conscious of how that’s coming through. For example, my real life mother doesn’t cook but she can be very controlling, so I channeled some of those qualities into Isabella’s mother.
As for the self-esteem stuff, I definitely had my own struggles with that when I first moved to NY and tried to hoof it as a food writer. Early on, I was hired to host a web show for the Food Network, and on my first day — in front of an entire crew of camera and lighting people — I totally froze and couldn’t speak or even remember what I was supposed to say. So that first chapter and Isabella’s fiasco with the souffle was inspired by that.
The humor! I laughed out loud so many times. You have a huge knack for describing the most hilarious situations. Is that something that comes naturally to you or something you have to work toward?
What can I say? I’m hilarious!
But in a book, the jokes have to be sharper than they have to be real life. A lot of Owen’s quips were the best versions of jokes I came up with over multiple revisions. So it’s one part natural, one part work.
Tell us about your blog, now Substack, The Amateur Gourmet? It’s a treasure trove of culinary delight.
Back in the early 2000s — 2004 to be exact — I started cooking to save myself from the inanity of law school (I accidentally went to law school). My friends told me I should start a blog and I said, “What’s a blog?”
Twenty-one years later, I’m still sharing my everyday experiences in the kitchen. I love taking pictures of the things that I cook and eat and then writing about them twice a week in my newsletter. It’s not only a chance for me to process the experience (like serving what might have been completely raw hamburgers on July 4th?) and also to hopefully inspire more people to get into the kitchen.
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with our Friends & Fiction community. This is a book sure to reach a wide and adoring audience. Can you share what you might be working on next? I’m ready to pre-order!
Well, speaking of law school, my next book is about a recent law school graduate who realizes she’s made a terrible mistake and wants to become a chef. I wonder where I got that idea? Thanks for the great questions!
About the Author
ADAM ROBERTS is the author of The Amateur Gourmet, Secrets of the Best Chefs, and Give My Swiss Chards to Broadway. He started his food blog The Amateur Gourmet in 2004, and also hosts the podcast Lunch Therapy. Roberts has also written for The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, and for film and television. He lives in Brooklyn with his husband and their dog Winston. Food Person is his first novel.
About the Book
For fans of Alison Espach's The Wedding People and Dolly Alderton's Good Material, a delectable comedy of manners about cooking, ambition, and friendship set in the food world as a young and socially awkward writer takes a job ghostwriting the cookbook for a famous (and famously chaotic) Hollywood starlet.
Isabella Pasternack is a food person. She revels in the beauty of a perfectly cooked egg, she daydreams about her first meal at Chez Panisse, and every inch of her tiny apartment teems with cookbooks, from Prune to Cooking by Hand to Roast Chicken and Other Stories. What Isabella is not, unfortunately, is a gainfully employed person. In the wake of a disastrous live-streamed soufflé demonstration, Isabella is summarily fired from her job at a digital food magazine and must quickly find a way to keep herself in buckwheat and anchovy paste. When offered the opportunity to ghostwrite a cookbook for Molly Babcock, the once-beloved television actress now mired in scandal, Isabella warily accepts. Unfortunately, Molly quickly proves herself to be a nightmare collaborator: hungover, flaky, shallow, and—worst of all—indifferent to food. But between Molly’s bizarre late-night texts, goofy confessions, and impromptu road trips, Isabella reluctantly begins to see Molly’s charms. Can Isabella corral Molly out of the gossip rags and into the kitchen? Can she find the key to Molly’s heart and stomach? Or will Isabella’s devotion to her culinary idols and Molly’s monstrous ego send the entire cookbook—and both of their careers—up in flames?
A mouthwatering, hilarious debut peppered with insider food world detail—the real writers behind celebrity chef cookbooks, the hot restaurants that run on the backs of their sous-chefs, the secret to perfect blinis à la Russe—Adam Roberts’s Food Person is a literary soufflé—a deceptively light, deliciously rich, showstopping confection.
Reviews
“[Roberts] writes with deep humor and authority about the food world and its inhabitants, and with humanity about the various appetites that drive his characters.”
—Joanne Kaufman, The Wall Street Journal
“This debut novel is part romp, part satire, and frequently mouthwatering. Do not read on an empty stomach.”
—Hollywood Reporter
“Adam Roberts made me, someone who formerly thought Chef Boyardee was the ultimate celebrity chef, an honest-to-goodness FOOD PERSON in this savory meal of a debut. Charming, witty, and served with all the food industry insight the author’s decades of experience bring to the table. You’ll want seconds! I can’t wait to see what Adam dishes up next.”
—Steven Rowley, New York Times bestselling author of The Guncle Abroad
“Literally the most delicious beach read—sharp, funny, and bang on trend, this novel is a Devil Wears Prada for devoted foodies. I had to stop every other chapter to cook a chocolate soufflé or brownies!”
—Plum Sykes, New York Times bestselling author of Wives Like Us
“Food Person is a debut that’s about as perfect as they come…Get ready for a riotous, delicious romp.”
—Grant Ginder, author of The People We Hate at the Wedding
“At turns hilarious, harrowing, and heartwarming, this wonderful debut will be beloved by food people everywhere—and if you’re not a food person already, it may make one out of you.”
—J. Ryan Stradal, New York Times bestselling author of Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club
“I scarfed this book down in a single seating. Utterly delicious and satisfying to the end.”
—Mary Roach, New York Times bestselling author of Gulp
“[This] comedy of manners follows an unemployed food writer, Isabella, who agrees to ghostwrite a cookbook for a badly behaved starlet hoping to revive her career and reputation. The writing is hilarious and thoughtful.”
—Cup of Jo
“Roberts is a terrific writer who loves food, knows his way around the kitchen and can grab—and hold—your attention on just about any subject....Also, he’s naturally funny....Food Person...is about good friendships and messy relationships—messy kitchens too....With all that’s going on around us, a little romance, some smiles, a bunch of laughs, and a lot of good food seems like a perfect recipe.”
—Dorie Greenspan
“In cookbook author and food blogger Roberts’ delightful debut novel, Isabella, a lost, twentysomething foodie agrees to ghostwrite a has-been actress’ cookbook....Roberts’ love for food shines....Filled with ‘salty surprise,’ Food Person is perfectly cooked.”
—Booklist, starred
“Roberts’ novel is a confection—satisfyingly over-the-top—but with complex notes; he has a true knack for understanding the ways that food rules every aspect of our lives, from the gourmet’s obsession to the shame and guilt surrounding indulgence. But even readers who don’t know a branzino from bearnaise will find plenty to enjoy here, from the colorful secondary characters to the zippy plot. A debut novel that dishes up one of the most delectable ingredients of all: fun.”
—Kirkus Reviews
”Entertaining....Roberts’s breezy and zany dramedy offers a fun take on the joy and business of cooking.”
—Publishers Weekly
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