Dwight: You’re not funny all the time. But life is undergirded by humor. I mean, humor speaks to the brain, emotion speaks to the heart. It’s nice to have both sides spoken to. I feel like in a good piece of writing. And I don’t really trust critics who are never funny. Maybe I’ve heard some, but not many. And so yeah, I like to blend those two things. As a critic, you know, it’s a hard job. I mean, you can’t write for the author in the end, you know, I mean, millions of people, I mean, I have to write for the many people who are reading me. I, you know, I can’t write for the writer. And yet I try not to be overly harsh. When I am harsh, it’s normally against a target that can take it.

Dwight: Someone who’s published a lot of books, it’s already had a certain amount of notoriety. You know, I do the same process with my reviews. I take a lot of notes and I work my way through them. And I want to. I remember early in my life I would sometimes meet a journalist and I would find out more from talking to him or her in five minutes that I would from reading a whole year of their articles. And I remember thinking, I don’t want to be that kind of person. I want to say what I think and I want to talk to the reader as if I’m talking to a pretty good friend. You know, I want to tell them about this book as if I’m writing to a friend. And I try to do that.

Dwight: I’m not sure I always succeed, but that’s part of my the thing I want to do.

Stacy: Welcome. As a child, my dream was to have a career in books and I think most writers share that dream. And today’s guest has spent much of his career immersed in reading and writing, especially as a book critic at the New York Times. Today I’m excited to get to talk with Dwight Garner about his latest book, his writing and research process, and his role as a book criticism. So with that said, let me introduce you to this week’s guest.

Stacy: Dwight Garner is a book critic for the New York Times and was previously the senior editor of the New York Times Book Review. His essays and criticism have also appeared in the New Republic, Harper’s Magazine, Slates, and other publications. His most recent book is the Upstairs on Eating, Reading About Eating and Eating While Reading, a charming emotional memoir. In it, he records the voices of great writers and the stories from his life that fill his mind as he moves through the sections of the day and of this book. Breakfast, lunch, shopping, the occasional nap, drinking and dinner. Dwight, welcome.

Dwight: Thanks for having me.

Stacy: Stacy, I have to tell you first off that my 11 year old daughter loves your book title and she wanted me to make sure to tell you that it’s such a great title.

Dwight: Thank you.

Stacy: For our listeners that haven’t read the Upstairs Delicatessen yet because it does detail a lot of your backstory. So if you’ve read it, you would know the question I’m about to ask you. I’d love for you to share a little bit of your backstory from your childhood spent immersed in magazines and books up through your role that you’ve had for a couple decades as a book critic for the New York Times.

Dwight: Yeah, I mean, I, I, you know, I, I, I was born in West Virginia. My grandfather was a coal miner. My dad went to law school in West Virginia and we moved to Florida when I was about 8. And that’s about the time that I became a very serious reader. And as I read in my book, I would very often want to add food to my experience. I don’t know why the two things just went together for me. And the more I read, you know, I mean, back then, before there was the Internet, before there was Netflix, reading novels was a way to find out about other people and how other people lived and what they did and how they, you know, just went through the world, how they had sex, how they ate.

Dwight: And I, I found myself really amazed by some of the food descriptions and things I was reading. And I’d never had an oyster. I, I read in one book that a character was having real maple syrup and I remember thinking, well, what am I Using if it’s not real. And I found out that what I. What were using was like corn syrup. It wasn’t. Anyway, it’s one thing led to a next with my reading. And I was always fascinated by the food stuff in it. In Naples, I went to a public high school in Naples, Florida, which is on the Gulf coast of Florida. I went to Middlebrook College. I was the kind of kid who was the editor of my school newspaper in high school, editor of my school newspaper in college.

Dwight: I was writing all kinds of criticism already while in college for national magazines. And I went in the direction of writing about books rather than writing about food because, I don’t know, there aren’t many jobs running about food or there weren’t back then, you know. And so I had a number of jobs in journalism, and I wrote widely here and there. And I ended up becoming one of the founding editors of Salon.com, which was the first real online magazine. This was in 1995. I didn’t even have email at the time. So I just sort of like online magazine. I thought I’d be throwing my work down a hole, you know, and it turned out to be a really good magazine. Then I went to the Book Review as an editor for 10 years.

Dwight: And editor there means assign, like reading a new book, okay, here’s a book, and. And reading it and thinking, this is pretty good. Who should we assign it to? And I would pull up the list of names and you would. A big part of the job was sort of setting a dinner table, finding the right critic to do a certain book. And then in 2008, I moved over to become a book critic for the New York Times.

Stacy: That’s such a neat journey. And I can really resonate with that idea of books opening up the world to you. I was similar to you as a child growing up in Idaho, and we call it Whiteaho. It’s so lacking in diversity and kind of cultural experiences outside of our very white kind of standard American experience. It really gives you an opportunity to kind of journey into other states, other countries, other cultures. And I really credit for myself, I credit that experience of reading as the reason I ended up moving now to four different countries. It made me feel like it was really accessible. I think that’s such a gift as a childhood, to have that access to other ways of functioning in the world.

Dwight: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think it’s just a. It’s a largely a factor of curiosity, you know, I mean, some people just have it and Other people don’t. And it’s no knock on those people. Some people are just really comfortable where they are in terms of the food they eat. So many people never really escape the sort of, you know, the food that they grew up eating, and they want to eat that, and it’s very comforting to them, and I get that, but I’m just not that person. I read something in a book, and I’m going to go cook it. I’m going to find out, and I’m going to cook. If I read about a new dish, I have to try. It’s just, you know, one thing leads to the next. The same with books.

Dwight: You read one book and it mentions another book, and you read that. Just go through life, you know, following these trails that veer out in front of you.

Stacy: Yes. I have to say, while I was reading your book, I did find myself snacking more than normal with all of food references. I want to talk to you about the creation of this book because one of the things that struck me about your work is just how intricate it is. There’s this layering of your personal story and all of these decades of reading, you know, all of this great literature, and you. You were able to organize to connect with your personal stories, but it never felt disjointed. It felt very flowy and like a natural unfolding. I wanted to know about. I want to know about your planning process for this. I’m really curious how you generated the idea and did you create a detailed outline? Did you. Did you create this as you went? I think I remember from.

Stacy: In the back of the book, you mentioned in the acknowledgments that you. Some of the pieces had run originally in the New York Times. Can you just talk me through that creation process and outlining and planning before even writing the book?

Dwight: Yeah. I’m really glad that you feel like it works together, because I was worried about it. You know, as you know, it’s a lot of my writing, but it’s a lot of other people’s writing. I talk about food writing that I love from novels and from cookbooks and all kinds of books, memoirs. You know, my. My. My dirty secret, my dirty professional secret, is that for almost 40 years, I have kept what’s known as a commonplace book. And what that is, if your readers haven’t heard about it, is it’s a very old term and many writers have kept them. It’s a place where you write down favorite lines from things you read. And I started doing it sort of naively when I was in my teens. And when you’re. When you’re in your teens, you know, the dumbest things sound cool to you?

Dwight: You know, oh, yes. Life is like a box of chalk. You know, you write down the stupid stuff from whatever novel you’re reading and. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become sort of obsessed with it. And I’ve kept. My commonplace book is now on my laptop. It’s enormous. When I read. If I read a great description of, like, an airplane flight or a great line about flying, I’ll put it in the flying section. And then I have a million sections, and the biggest section is probably food. And so when I sat down to write this book, I knew that I had copious notes and sort of organized too into, like, you know, eggs. I have this many, you know. And so as I went through the book talking about my own life, my own breakfast, I would refer to this.

Dwight: And to give myself a bit more credit, which I probably don’t deserve, I have a good memory for quotes. You know, for some reason, I can’t remember what I had for break. I can’t remember, like, basic things, but I can remember if I’m reading about. If I’m having a cup of coffee, I can remember, like, great. Four great things people have said about coffee. I just have a knack for that. And anyway, I just approached this book. You know, I sort of realized that someday I might want to write a memoir. And then I thought to myself, you know, Dwight, your life is too boring. You’ve never been in a shipwreck or been chased by a bear. Nothing really incredible has happened to me. And so I thought that one way of talking about my life might be to do it through food.
Dwight: And that’s sort of what I tried to do in this book.

Stacy: I love that you have this thing that you pulled from. It makes a lot of sense, just having read the book. But also, as I was reading, I was thinking, he must have a great memory for just being able to. Sometimes it’s just that little thread of. I know I read something in this book about this thing. I need to go find that. And you do such a nice job of pulling that all together. And I would be so curious to see this book that you’ve. I’m sure it’s like a tome at this point. If you’ve been keeping it since you were in your teens, that’s pretty cool.

Dwight: Yeah, well, it’s all on laptop now, you know, but I. But I work on it almost every day. I’m obsessed. I don’t know why. Anyway, I love that.
Stacy: That’s great. So when you were planning the book, then just to drill a little deeper, this is my kind of nerdy book structuring side coming through. As you were planning it, did you have a really detailed outline or did you more broadly scope out the sections of the book and then have a sense of what you wanted to write and create more freely, or did you have a really good sense of how that writing would all unfold before you wrote each section?

Dwight: You know, it’s a good question. I didn’t know. It took me a while to find the structure for this, but once I thought of it just seemed like a no brainer. Why not walk through a day, one person’s day, of, you know, eating and reading? And that’s sort of what I did. It starts at breakfast and I talk about my first cup of coffee and making my eggs and, you know, tea, how proper tea is made, and all sorts of things like that. And then there’s a chapter on lunch. And I sort of, you know, I have a lament for the lack for the. For the disappearance of the big, you know, two martini lunch, which no one does much anymore.

Dwight: And I have a chapter on shopping, which I tend to do, you know, on many days, because it’s fun to go get fresh things when you can. And then drinking and dinner and I didn’t. Dessert. I left out desserts. I have no sweet tooth. So maybe if I ever do a sequel, maybe I’ll. I’ll try to do that.

Stacy: Yeah, I loved the way that unfolded really naturally in it. And then also when we get to actually go on a grocery trip with you, that was such a nice way to organize that whole content. It was great.

Dwight: Oh, thank you.

Stacy: Okay, so I would love to know about your creative process. I’m curious. I know you read a lot, obviously, and you have a full time job and family and all of these things that you balance. Did you have to shift your schedule, create a new writing routine? Do you write every day? What did that process look like as you were crafting this book and getting it done?

Dwight: Well, it’s. It’s funny. I wrote this book during COVID I was working on a different book and I was living in West Virginia for a year because I’m working on a book about. It’s complicated, but partly a memoir, partly about how people view mountain people in America, the Appalachians, and all of that. And then Covid happened right in the middle of it. And so a Lot of research I was doing, I couldn’t do anymore. And so I thought, let’s try a different kind of book. And. And so I sort of slowly began thinking about it and I peeled off into this idea. We were moving around during COVID I don’t know why. We just had wanderlust and lived in West Virginia. We lived in New Orleans, lived in Provincetown, out on Cape Cod and somewhere else anyway.

Dwight: And, you know, I would just go to coffee shops. I would just, you know, I would get up early in the morning, work for a couple hours on the book, and then go do my times job, which is very demanding. It doesn’t seem demanding maybe to review a book a week. But often, you know, you’re reviewing a novelist’s third novel and it’s a thick book, and then you realize, well, I should read the first two novels. And then that’s a big job, you know, it’s. It’s hard to do. And so I’m. Often there’s a lot of research behind a book review, pretty often. And so my day job is not a simple one, but I found time. I enjoyed writing this book. You know, I don’t know, it just kind of came pretty easily.

Stacy: Covid was such a unique time for writing and for reading. Our daughter, Covid, was the time that she really fell in love with reading. She had been an okay reader before that period, but she would be up there for five plus hours just, you know, reading in her room because we had the space and the time. And I found the same in. In the writing world. A lot of people dusted off those ideas or came up with new ideas of books that they wanted to write. I think there was probably something really unique about that space for you. Even though you were moving around a lot, you still had your really demanding job, but all of the normal demands of, you know, daily social life were off in a way.
Dwight: That’s a good point. And it’s funny, they haven’t really completely come back. You know, I feel like my social life is half what it was. Maybe people, maybe I’m just unpopular. I feel like before COVID we all went out a bit more, you know, and seems like we all had more dinner parties and more what’s going on. But it may just be the fact that I’m now nearly 60. But yeah, I totally agree with you. And it was hard for me too, because I had to. I had to have a lot of books with me to write this book, you know, to use as research. And often I wouldn’t know the book until I was writing and I didn’t have it.

Dwight: And, you know, every writer knows there are sneaky ways to find quotes from books online, but some of those weren’t available, and I’d have to call friends and have them photograph a page for me. Anyway, it was a lot of work coming up with all those references.

Stacy: A lot of them were quite old, too. You had some in the 1800s, early 1900s, so I imagine those were not readily accessible, easy to. Easy to find online.

Dwight: Well, a lot of the books are still in print, you know, so I may own the novel, even though it’s an old one. There’s probably. There’s a new edition I probably have. But you’re right. You’re right. And a lot of it was, you know, it took a lot of. That took a fair number of things from magazines and that kind of thing. In terms of previous. Right. In terms of having parts appeared in other places, they’re very small things. I’d written a piece, for example, for the Times about Jacques Pepin, and I found his. His. His little videos during COVID to be very moving. You know, he sort of went. He sort of went and did this very simple cooking, sort of, you know, simple things done really well. And I find them. I found them very calming.

Dwight: And I found his whole vibe really wonderful during that period. And I wrote a piece for the Times about that. And I kind of tuck parts of it and put it into this book. And it’s not the whole thing, but it’s, you know, I use bits of it.

Stacy: I love finding those inspirations at the right time of your life. Right. Because it can shift so much as you grow and change and evolve. I pulled a quote from your book that I. There were so many lines in the book that I found to be so resonant and clear and crisp. And one of the lines that I read that really, to me was like, just such a great line. You say that writing is hard because thinking is hard. When I read that, I was like, obvious. I mean, that makes. It’s such a crisp and clear way to say it, but I love the way that you phrase that, and that made me curious about your own process. I know that we’ve talked about some of the logistical challenges of this book, just organizing the research, pulling it all together, helping us flow.
Stacy: Also, with your personal story, there’s that side of it. But from a creative standpoint, or maybe even a life standpoint, did you hit any challenges along the way of writing this book that you had to Overcome.

Dwight: That’s an interesting question. You know, in terms of writing. In terms of writing being hard because thinking is hard. You know, it’s funny. There’s so many people in this world who you think would be great writers because they’re great talkers, you know, and a lot of great talkers just can’t write. Life isn’t fair that way, you know, and, yeah, often I’m at a literary conference and there’ll be a big crowd and there’ll be someone speaking wonderfully, and nine times out of 10, it’s not the best writer who’s doing that. It’s just someone who has a big personality and has a book that’s sort of based on their personality. You know, they’re. They’re famous for being famous, and they’re good at talking and. Anyway, who cares about that? Except that I often feel more in sync with the people who aren’t comfortable speaking in public.

Dwight: You know, those are often the real writers to me. So that’s neither here nor there. But did anything come hard for me? I don’t know. It was hard sometimes. You know, all memoirists think this, but it’s hard sometimes to know how far you can go in terms of talking about your own family. I ran up against some of that. There’s some things that I might have printed but decided not to, and, you know, that was a problem. It was a problem. Sometimes just I would have long periods when I was working very hard for the New York Times, and sometimes I got away from it from too long, and I was just working on a big project for two or three weeks. For the Times, it was hard to get back into the mind frame of working on a book, which.

Dwight: That’s the biggest problem. I think that one of the biggest problems that writers face when they have other jobs and other lives is it’s not so hard to get a routine going. But then when you break that routine, maybe you’re forced to for whatever reason, it can be very hard to get into the mindset of where you were. It often takes, like, three days to get back in because you have to catch up on the reading and where you were. And that happened to me a few times.

Stacy: That momentum is so important, keeping that momentum moving. And when you lose it’s. It’s like starting a. I don’t know, a vehicle without an engine backup. You know, you’re like, pushing it until it finally kicks in and starts driving.

Dwight: Yeah.

Stacy: I’m curious, because you wrote memoir, did you learn anything about yourself or clarify anything about Your personal history as you were creating this story about your life.

Dwight: You know, I’m not sure that I did. It’s a good question. The book isn’t really. I mean, it’s a memoir and I say some serious things, but it’s something. It’s a surfacey account of my life. You know, it’s not. I don’t really wrestle with deep questions in this book. I mean, I sort of nod towards them and I work my way through some important things about food and I guess my own personality. But I’m not sure I learned anything new. Maybe I learned that I was more of an introvert than I thought in the first place.

Stacy: I don’t know your voice as a writer, and I think this is a good segue. As with humor, you’re a very funny writer and you integrate humor not only into the book, but also in your writing for the New York Times. And I pulled a quote from a recent review you wrote of a book that is on my to read list. I have not read her most recent book yet. You wrote Intermezzo. Is Sally Rooney with a bit more butter and cream? Yes, please. Waiter. Call me a fool for love, but this oft jaundiced reader found this meal to be discerning, fattening, old school, and delicious. I. I just. It made me chuckle out loud. And I love that you integrate humor into. Into how you write your columns from the New York Times. I’d love to hear a little bit about.

Stacy: More about your process of critiquing a book and including how to me, when I read your work, there’s a. There’s an empathy for. For the author that comes through to me. It’s like you’re holding the book, but you’re considering the author and you’re bringing in humor. I’d love to hear how you think about your reviews and kind of your philosophy when you review a book.

Dwight: Oh, it’s a tough question. It’s a good question. I like writers who are funny. Not funny all the time, but life is undergirded by humor. I mean, humor speaks to the brain, emotion speaks to the heart. It’s nice to have both sides spoken to. I feel like in a good piece of writing, and I don’t really trust critics who are never funny. Maybe I’ve heard some, but not many. And so, yeah, I like to blend those two things. As a critic, you know, I. It’s a hard job. I mean, you. You can’t write for the author in the end. You know, I mean, millions of people I mean, I guess two million. I don’t. I forget what the subscriptions numbers are for the New York Times. But I have to write for the many people who are reading me.

Dwight: I, you know, I can’t write for the writer. And yet I try not to be overly harsh. When I am harsh, it’s normally against a target that can take it, someone who’s published a lot of books, it’s already had a certain amount of notoriety. I would never clobber a first novel just because why bother? I mean, you know, maybe once or twice I’ve. I’ve written negatively about a first novel, but only after it’s been sort of buzzed about for a long time and it seems like, worth weighing in. But to sort of lower the boom on something no one’s ever heard of seems sort of ridiculous. So I don’t do that. And I don’t know, you know, I do the same process with my reviews. I take a lot of notes and I work my way through them. And I want.

Dwight: I remember early in my life, I would sometimes meet a journalist and I would find out more from talking to him or her in five minutes than I would from reading a whole year of their articles. I remember thinking, I don’t want to be that kind of person. I want to say what I think, and I want to talk to the reader as if I’m talking to a pretty good friend. You know, I want to tell them about this book as if I’m writing to a friend. And I try to do that. I’m not sure I always succeed, but that’s part of my. The thing I want to do.

Stacy: I. It definitely comes through in your article writing and in your book writing. And I imagine that has. That development of voice has taken a lot of time and shaping over the years, seeing what also resonates with readers when you look back at some of your older writing. I don’t know if you’ve done that in recent years. I know every so often I peek back at something like 15 years ago, 10 years ago. What do you. What do you think has been your kind of development as a writer? Like, how has your writing changed from Salon to the New York Times?

Dwight: Well, I think I had my voice pretty early on. You know, I look back at some things I wrote, even for salon, which was 30, you know, 30 years ago now, and I sometimes I’ll find. When I think that’s not bad, you know, I think that kid had something going on, you know, but just as often, even pieces from five or Ten years ago I read from the Times and I just heart sick at how lame they feel. And normally when I’m lame, it’s because I’m trying too hard. You know, I’m just over egging. I have too many metaphors, too many images. I’m trying too hard for the joke. I’m just, I’m a. More the. The critic Robert Christow, who was a great rock critic, wrote for the Village Boys. He’s still around. I shouldn’t use past tense. He has a great substack.

Dwight: He said he likes writing that has more wons in it. And I, I feel like I write with a lot of wontons. Like I want to give the reader a lot of pleasure. I try to sort of, you know, put my whole self into something and when I go wrong, I think it’s because I put too much my whole self in. So I think over time my style has gotten a little bit clearer, my sentences have gotten a little bit shorter. I don’t use as many adjectives, but I still use may than most people.

Stacy: When you’re, you know, you mentioned reading and all of the lifting that’s required for your role at the New York Times. How do you balance reading for pleasure and reading for work? I’m sure that’s hard to juggle sometimes.

Dwight: Yeah. My rule in my rule to my kids was, you know, ABC always be carrying, you know, which means, you know, always have a book with you, especially in New York, because, you know, I always have one book going just for the subway, you know, and I never leave the house because I’m on the subway, you know, a lot. And it often a half an hour to go somewhere. And it’s a lot of reading if you stick at it. And I have a book in the bathroom at all times, there’s a different book going in there. I always have a cookbook that I’m reading. I like to read cookbooks before bed and I like to leave them out, hoping my wife will get inspired to cook me something because she’s a vastly better cook than I am.

Dwight: I can cook, but for her it’s just natural and for me it’s a big hassle and I freak out. But so I have three books going and then I have the book I’m reading for the Times. You know, as a matter of fact, I’m working on a new book which I can’t really talk about yet, but it’s vaguely food related. And so I have a big pile of Books on my floor that I’m trying to read for that book as well. And anyway, it’s a lot of books, but I like it. And then when I finish a book, let’s say my Subway book, you know, right now I’m reading. Well, I often read Letters, but I’m reading right now this book about American humor and sort of old school American humor by Constance O’Rourke.

Dwight: And Old School meaning like the Revolutionary War period, you know. And when I finish it, though, I will go through it. This is not that book, but I’ll go through every page and see what I’ve underlined and written in the margins, and I’ll transfer all that into my commonplace books. So if she has a great line about humor that I think I could use someday, that’s just great. I will sit here and type it into my commonplace book. I’ll turn every page, and whatever I’ve underlined, I will put it in my commonplace book when I’m done, which takes about an hour. I don’t know why I do it, but maybe it’s my grand opus. And when I’m dead, someone will publish it and it’ll be this big. So who knows?

Stacy: I love. I love that habit so much. And also you have a record of the books that you’ve read and your reflections on it. It’s. It’s amazing. One of the things that struck me in your book, and I’m glad you brought it up, about reading cookbooks, that was really interesting to me. I’m kind of new to cookbooks. This is something. In the last two years, we’ve. We’ve added a lot of fermentation and whole, you know, really from scratch, cooking in our home. And that’s been a whole journey for us. I mean, it really kind of requires you to flip your. It almost actually changes the culture of your family in a way, when you’re completely changing the way you eat because you’re learning a new style of making things.

Stacy: And I have also found a lot of comfort in cookbooks, and I kind of didn’t even realize that until I was reading your book. And I reflected on my own experience reading these cookbooks as we’ve kind of learned this way of feeding our kids and eating differently. And, you know, it’s interesting because part of that, I think, of course, they have the little writing sections in the book, and there’s that part. But also I feel when. When I’m reading about recipes that I’m interested in, it’s just. It’s getting me to Be creative. Like I’m creating it in my mind. Even though actually my husband, like your wife, My husband is our family cook. I almost don’t cook anything in our house. There is like a creation that almost happens internally as you’re reading it.

Dwight: No, I think that’s very true. You’re sort of visualizing, you know, a lot about the recipe. I like it when a head note is well written in a cookbook. You know, I like that it probably doesn’t matter, but I feel like I trust the chef more if they can write a little bit, which is magical thinking for sure. But I, but I do like that. And I don’t know, cookbooks just take you places, you know, and you know, the best ones, you know, reference other cookbooks and other recipes and other chefs. And I particularly love cookbooks like. Well, the magazine, the food magazine Sever has a big collection of their it’s recipes and I love the magazine. And its recipes are great because they’re from hundreds of chefs. Like it’s a magazine that’s collected these.

Dwight: They’ve collected them from restaurants and from their own writers. And so it’s a cookbook. Not by one sensibility, which could be nice, but I like these big cookbooks like the New York Times cookbook. It’s recipes they published from chefs over more than 100 years. And so what you’re getting is not just a times person’s take on food. It’s all these people they’ve used over centuries, decades. And so I like that I have a lot of those kind of cookbooks. And I don’t know, you know, I just like being surrounded by a wall of cookbooks at every moment there.

Stacy: It’s almost like a historical documentation of, you know, all of the periods of food. And even today, as we’re prepping for Thanksgiving, I pulled up my late aunt’s broccoli salad recipe that I’m going to be making for a friendsgiving that we’re having on Friday. And I was smiling as I pulled that up. There is that connection to memory. And then with the cookbook side of it, maybe it’s the creation in your head, but also the maybe future, maybe not actively imagining the future memories you could have with the food, but there’s this knowing that food can often create those feelings in our lives and our relationships.
Dwight: Right. For me, with cookbooks, it’s also that, you know, everyone gets their recipes with so many people do online these days, you know, and they’re really crappy a lot of them. And you have to wade through a thousand pages of ads and descriptions and you finally get to the recipe. And I buoy on that, you know, I don’t want to cook like Doug’s recipe. I want to cook Julia Child’s, you know, and so there’s a great. I don’t mean just Julie Child, by the way. I don’t just mean cooking highbrow food. But great cookbooks have all kinds of recipes in them. And if you want to make macaroni and cheese, well, I’d rather cook something that, you know, I don’t know who did. But, you know, even in a garten, you know, rather than cook Doug’s from his website. And so there’s a great.
Dwight: I mentioned this, I think, in my book, or maybe I didn’t. There’s a great website called eatyourbooks.com and you enter into its database the cookbooks you own. And then if you have an ingredient on hand, let’s say broccolini or razor clams or whatever, you enter it and it will tell you what the recipes, what recipes are in your own books on your shelf that uses that ingredient. And I love that because I’ll go pull a book out that I haven’t seen for a while. And, you know, I don’t want to cook Doug’s broccolini. I’m going to cook Paul Bocuse’s broccolini, you know, so it’s just a little better.

Stacy: That’s such an awesome tool. And I’m chuckling that you picked the name Doug because that’s my husband’s name. I do want to eat. His broccolini is excellent. But yes, I hear what you say. I know when we I mentioned this kind of food journey we’ve been on as a family, buying the cookbook stand felt nice. Like I have this wooden stand. And we’re actually creating something that’s in this kind of curated space that has been lovingly prepared in this book and tested and photographed. And there is a very different experience to that than just like googling the brownie you want to make and make it in on. You’re right. With those ads popping out. So I love that example of that resource and I’ll be sure to drop that in our show notes and try it out, too.

Stacy: I have a surprise question for you from my daughter, who I know I’ve mentioned a couple of times, and her name is Lily. She’s 11. And as I mentioned, she is a voracious reader. She’s way surpassed me at her age. I think she’s read just as an example of the Harry Potter series, like 40 times at least. I mean, she’s just. Just loves to read. So when I told her that were going to talk, she was like, really? So I invited her to record a question for you. And I’m going to hold it up to the mic here for you so you can hear what her question is. If you had to pick a book and that’d be the only book you’d ever read, which book would that be?

Stacy: And keep in mind, that’d be the only book you’d ever read from age 1 to age 1074 or something like that.

Dwight: Okay, that’s a good question. It’s a great question. It’s a hard question. You know, I listen a lot. One of my favorite podcasts is from the BBC. It’s called Desert Island Discs. You must know that. Anyway, it’s good. And they have each week there’s someone interviewed and it’s about the music they would take to a desert island. And often the people are quite famous. They’re movie stars, but sometimes they’re lesser people. They’re scientists or, you know, whatever. And it’s a great honor to be on the show in England. And that’s the question they ask at the end. They say, we’ll give you the. On your island. You can have the Bible and you can have the complete works of Shakespeare. What other. What other book would you want? Right? And so my favorite book, I think, is Moby Dick by Melville.

Dwight: I just think it’s the greatest work of literature in just about the English language, certainly written in America. And. But here’s the trick. I would want it to be in a bilingual edition so I could learn a language while I was reading it. I’d like to learn German, maybe Melville in German. Maybe I’d have. I could read Melville and then read the German edition to go back and forth, and that’d be my book.

Stacy: That’s so smart because it keeps you entertained in the literary form, but also entertained in the learning and development of a new language. It’s so smart. I love that. Dwe. It’s been just such a delightful conversation and really grateful for your time today, especially as we are recording this on the eve of the biggest foodie holiday in the entire US which is Thanksgiving. So I appreciate you taking the time to be with us today. Last question for you is, what are you most excited about right now?

Dwight: Oh, boy. Well, I’m most excited about my meal tomorrow. We’re cooking Indian for Thanksgiving, so which we’ve never done before, but we’re going to try it out. My kids voted for that, so I’m excited for that. You know, I’m excited to stop worrying about politics if I can. I’m excited, too. I’m turning 60 in a couple of weeks. I’m looking forward to having a decent party. And, you know, I’m just looking forward to reading good books this year.

Stacy: That’s a very good thing to look forward to, especially given your profession. It’s good. It’s good that you’re looking forward to reading more good books. Dwight, thank you so much for your time and energy and sharing about your book and your writing process and all of the great things that you shared with us today.

Dwight: Thank you, Stacy. It was fun.

Stacy: And thank you to you, the listener, for joining us. I know that you got so much value from this conversation and I hope that you’re leaving feeling inspired maybe to write your own book. Thank you as always to Rita Domingues for her production of this fine podcast. I truly could not do it without her and I am grateful and I will be back with you before you know it.