Starting the blog was a way for me to generate this nonfiction first-person voice naturally, gradually, without feeling performance anxiety. It felt a bit like keeping journals when I was younger, but connecting to an instant readership without having to wait for publication made it also immediately satisfying.

Blogging is different from both journal-writing and writing for print. It's more fun than either of those. The freedom to write whatever I want and the unmediated connection with readers are the payoff.

My sudden, unforeseen capitulation had knocked me backward, and I had nothing to hold on to. My internal weather was eerily calm, as if in a tornado's aftermath, birdsong, sunshine, supersaturated colors, wreckage all around, and myself, dazed and limping.

Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult.

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.

I was also writing in a tradition and trying to do something different with it, something that hadn't necessarily been done before, which was a risk, but it made it interesting. My relationship with food has been complicated and rocky and not always wonderful, and it's a lens through which my entire life and identity are refracted.

Thank God for my hobgoblin, small-minded consistency.