Molly Wizenberg
I started out as a food writer focused on home cooking, using food as a lens for peering into everyday life and relationships. I was interested in people, in how we find and make meaning for ourselves. I still am. My latest book, The Fixed Stars, is a memoir about sexuality, divorce, and motherhood. I wrote it because, in my mid-thirties, nearly a decade into marriage and newly a mother, I lost track of who I was. I wrote because I wanted an answer; in the process, I came to find that I liked the company of questions. The Fixed Stars will be published by Abrams Press on May 12, 2020.
I am also the author of A Homemade Life (Simon & Schuster, 2009) and Delancey (Simon & Schuster, 2014). Both were New York Times bestsellers. Before all that, I got my start in 2004 with a blog called Orangette, which won a number of awards, including a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award in 2015. The blog is now dormant-ish. Can’t decide what to do with it. I have written for Bon Appétit, The Washington Post, and Saveur, and in a previous lifetime, I co-founded (with chef Brandon Pettit) the award-winning Seattle restaurants Delancey and Essex. Last but not at all least: I co-host (with my friend Matthew Amster-Burton) the food-and-comedy podcast Spilled Milk, specializing in dumb jokes and chewing noises since 2010.
“Like most people who love to cook, I like the tangible things...but what I like even more are the intangible things: the familiar voices that fall out of the folds of an old cookbook, or the scenes that replay like a film reel across my kitchen wall. When we fall in love with a certain dish, I think that's what we're often responding to: that something else behind the fork or the spoon, the familiar story that food tells.”
“Even the Thanksgiving when her parents had just divorced, Hoosier Pie made the cut. ...They also, incidentally, made a pumpkin pie, but it fell on the floor, a classic example of survival of the fittest”
“To most people, I guess, turning twenty-one is all about booze. To me, turning twenty-one was all about coconut. Booze is nice, but coconut is chewable, and when push comes to shove, I will always like eating better than drinking. Everyone has their priorities.”
“My father had coats the way old spinsters have cats.”
“I hate the notion of a secret recipe. Recipes are by nature derivative and meant to be shared - that is how they improve, are changed, how new ideas are formed. To stop a recipe in it's tracks, to label it "secret" just seems mean.”