Inventing a True Thing
Isabella Pasternack loves food and writing, but can’t keep her digital food magazine job—partly because she’s more about Chez Panisse idolization than viral trends, to her editor’s annoyance. When she lucks into the opportunity to ghostwrite a celebrity cookbook, after weighing artistic integrity with economic reality, she decides she’ll not only take the job, but make it a standout manuscript. In no time, Isabella drives herself to desperation, burnout, and near disaster. This is the premise of Adam Roberts’s debut novel Food Person, but it’s not that far from the reality of aspiring food writers today.
Roberts, after decades of writing his blog, Amateur Gourmet, and publishing cookbooks, serves up the mercurial nature of food media and how food writers survive. The novel, out last May, is his bid for a different kind of reader attention. “Partially, why I wanted to get into novel writing was because I was sick of people skipping to the recipe,” Roberts said. “With a novel you have to read every paragraph to get the story.”
Roberts, along with Mark Kurlansky, Hannah Selinger, and Julia Turshen, form a cohort of food writers who’ve published, or are about to publish, novels. Kurlansky’s fiction and nonfiction could be easily mistaken for each other as both are richly illustrated with scenes and characters he’s drawn up from history or observed when dining out. Selinger’s fiction differs from her nonfiction subjects, but it won’t come as a shock that she’s written a thriller about small town politics after following her Instagram stories dissecting the latest Boston tea. Turshen’s novella focuses on farming and queer love, topics she’s known for writing about with warmth and nuance in her essays and cookbooks.
All four see the limitations and instability of being considered solely a “food writer” in the fractured media landscape, and possess a more expansive outlook on their work than food outlets allow. Thank God, says the reader who lives for the story.
Mark Kurlansky found accolades for his books on single ingredients like Cod and Salt, but novels sprouted, too. He published his first in 2005, and his sixth, Cheesecake, came out in July 2025. The story revolves around the ancient philosopher Cato’s recipe and the Greek immigrant cheesemaking family using it to attract wealthier customers. When asked about bearing the label “food writer,” he said, “I don't think of myself that way, but I'm always writing about food, so I can't really escape it. The thing, though, about my writing on food is the food has always been used to get at something else. To show the politics, the characters, the history, or other things like that, using food to bring other meaning around.”
Kurlansky wanted to be a fiction writer first, and “stumbled” into nonfiction. “Somebody once said that nonfiction gives you the facts, but fiction tells you the truth,” says Kurlansky, “which is a harder thing to do, really. When I write fiction, I also do a lot of research, as I would for nonfiction, but ultimately, you're making things up, but the things you make up have to be true.”
Truth is what brought Hannah Selinger to write her essay “Life Was Not a Peach,” about what it was really like working for David Chang as a sommelier. Her essay led to Cellar Rat: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly, a memoir, but her next book is a thriller about a Parent Teacher Organization gone extreme in New England. Valley of the Moms comes out in 2026, and while it isn’t a food novel, being a food writer was influential.
“We're all food writers, but we're not really on the same beat, right?” says Selinger. “We're all interested in different microbeats, and that's because food isn't really just food. Food is politics and food is immigration and food is travel, and food is geographical. Anyone who's a capable food writer who can see the world in all of these different ways, who can see the world through the lens of food, could very easily transition that to being a novel writer.”
Selinger, like Kurlansky, is not new to fiction, although Valley of the Moms is her debut novel. She got an MFA in fiction in 2005 before going in a different direction. “I always thought I was going to be a novelist, but it's actually really hard to sell fiction. And to write fiction,” she says. “I think at first I wasn't completely convinced that I was a great fiction writer.”
Perhaps the narrative of “turned to fiction” is a bit off the mark. All four writers have written and read fiction for years, whether for a few or twenty. Sometimes it was a love that predated their food writing career, and sometimes it was the result of dabbling, especially as their food media profile gained prominence. The announcement from Publishers Marketplace is merely the first public acknowledgement: the novel has already been planted, tended, and matured.
Like Kurlansky and Selinger, Roberts has written fiction for a long time; it just took a while to find the right idea. “Since graduate school in 2004, I congruently was always working on my nonfiction food writing and also working on playwriting, screenwriting, TV writing, and attempts at writing a novel,” Roberts said. “I didn't latch onto a great idea for a novel until 20 years later, when I had the experience of ghostwriting celebrities' cookbooks.” After the grueling experience of cookbook writing, with countless hours spent on recipe testing and photography, Roberts is hopeful about the staying power of fiction.
“The novel can have a life beyond its first few weeks because people slowly discover it,” he said. “The novel can resonate longer in the culture.”
Another familiar writer with a debut novella coming in 2026 is Julia Turshen, bestselling cookbook author and cooking teacher. Turshen’s Down to Earth is a queer romance set in upstate New York about a farmer looking for love. Turshen, with many cookbooks to her name, sees the novel as an extension of her work, especially as she’s written more personally about her relationship to her body in recent years.
“Writing a story about two women who are falling for each other in their relationship, it's also very much about their bodies. It's a way in that’s less informational than a cookbook, but still has the same values and goals,” she said. Turshen is newer to fiction writing but has long been a romance reader, and she’s happy for the new outlet.
“It's been such a thrill to get to just write and to not do the 10,000 other things that are part of making a cookbook,” Turshen said. “There are so many elements in a cookbook, which is why I love working in cookbooks, but getting to work on this romance novel means I get to just write.”
It makes a lot of sense that all four writers' first books were nonfiction, published after establishing their names through blogging, journalism, and cookbook writing. Unknown debut novelists are a risk the ever-destabilizing publishing industry isn’t keen to take.
“The market is crumbling, and many of us are looking at disparate forms of income,” Selinger said. Writers must be quick on their feet to survive and “throw another dart on the board,” as Turshen said. Charlotte Druckman, who covers food books extensively, wrote about food writers publishing novels, lamenting, “It's a shame that ‘food writing’ as a fixed category hasn’t allowed its hired pens to scribble outside the thickset lines of its ever-simplifying rubrics.” Saving their fiction for later is an outcome of the mathematics of making a living as a writer in 2026.
Poet, short story writer, and activist Grace Paley said, “Every story is two stories. The one on the surface and the one bubbling beneath. The climax is when they collide.” A layered narrative is present in good fiction and nonfiction, but for a food writer, there often isn’t space or budget for this type of writing. It’s a different story for a novelist. Rather than readers who skip the headnote to get to the recipe, a fiction reader wants the full, complicated story. Like writing a novel, constructing a career as a writer is a multi-faceted project. For the love of writing, and for the sake of survival, food writers continue to show how good they are at writing novels, too.
Devin Kate Pope is a freelance writer based in Phoenix who publishes The Good Enough Weekly, a newsletter about food, politics, and art. Her writing has appeared in BOMB, Orion, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Devin also runs Kindred Word Studio, editing manuscripts, newsletters, and more, and consulting on content strategy for writers and artists.
