I wanted to capture time through how food and I were getting along at any given moment. That necessitated writing some dark stuff, some sad stuff, and a lot of painful memories, because my life has often been dark, sad, and painful. I didn't want to sugarcoat anything.

The pressure to be thin, which causes guilt and obsessiveness around food, is terrible and starts so early. For me, it started at sixteen when I left home and gained weight for the first time and was told by a slightly older boy, out of the blue, that I was "too plump." The shock of that lasted a good long time.

So many of my memories are generated by and organized around food: what I ate, what people cooked, what I cooked, what I ordered in a restaurant. My mental palate is also inextricably intertwined with the verbal part of my brain. Food, words, memories all twist together, so it was the obvious way to structure my life. Each memory of food opened up an entire scene for me, it was the key that unlocked everything.

I wanted to capture time through how food and I were getting along at any given moment. That necessitated writing some dark stuff, some sad stuff, and a lot of painful memories, because my life has often been dark, sad, and painful. I didn't want to sugarcoat anything.

Writing blog posts is totally freeing in a whole new way for me. I'm not writing it for any editor, and I'm not being paid, so I can say whatever I want. I don't have to justify the cost of a book to readers; they get it for free, so expectations are naturally low. (And no one-star reviews!)

I had to detach myself from myself, if that makes any sense, to conjure an authentic first-person voice. In that sense, it was similar to writing a first-person novel. But I was writing about real people, not fictional ones - myself, my family, my friends and boyfriends and ex-husband, and that was extremely tricky.

I've always subscribed to the notion that a writer always has something else to say, and the more you write, the more you have to write about, because the act of writing is self-generating.