It’s time to pre-order Food is a Feeling.
Food is a Feeling is coming out on September 8, exactly eight weeks from today. I will share tour information with you soon—the cities (10!), dates (all in September), and how to secure your spot and come to an event. For this tour, my third, not a single event will be a seated Q&A in a bookstore. We’re going to have actual fun together, and paid subscribers to Food Processing will have advance access to those tickets, jsyk.
While you wait, please pre-order. For better or for worse, preorders have become integral to the potential sales trajectory of every book, and the hustle to rack up those numbers falls on the authors themselves.
Booksellers use the advance sales numbers to measure excitement and demand. Strong pre-pub orders is a reason to stock a book. Mushy sales indicates a potential dud, and no one wants to end up sitting on inventory. Preorders also count towards the first-week book sales, which is the make-or-break metric for getting onto the bestsellers lists.
If you pre-order a book that is either not signed, or has a bookplate with my signature, and you bring it to ANY event, I will personalize your book and I’ll tape a salvaged kitchen label inside your book.
I’ve got an entire album for collecting new tape, and am adding to it daily in preparation for the tour (see here)!
For signed preorders, check these independent book sellers
Books Are Magic / Now Serving / Greenlight Bookstore / Omnivore / Bold Fork / Binding Agents / Read It and Eat
I am shamelessly asking you to add FIAF to your collection because your attention now could mean the difference for a project I’ve been working on for the last two years. This is by far the most personal book I’ve ever written, and I think it’s the best work of my life (… so far). I’ve written about the expenses that went into producing Food is a Feeling, and I will share more about the cover rejection approval process in an upcoming article.
Since I’m asking you to purchase it, I want to share what’s inside.
When I submitted the proposal for FIAF, the subtitle was Everything I Cooked and Ate the Year I Got Divorced. I still think it hits! Sad bugle: My publisher would not approve the word “divorce” anywhere on the cover. (The actual subtitle is Recipes & Stories, with Love.)
Even without the wildly offensive D Word, nothing can change the fact that FIAF was indeed inspired by my separation at the end of a 24-year cis het marriage. At the time, I had no plans to write this book (or any other one, to be clear), but as I moved through one of the most difficult, but also most exciting and rewarding periods of my life, I couldn’t stop thinking about food.
I was flooded by food memories, had very strong cravings, and felt just as strongly about satisfying them. This loop—want the food, make the food, eat the food, feel better—eventually led me to think critically about what “comfort food” really means. I’ve always connected eating well to good times, but feeding myself well during a bad/sad/hard time deepened my feelings about cooking as an act of self care (in a shockingly non-corny way).
Food is a Feeling is a full-throated endorsement of eating your feelings—whichever ones you’re having. No such thing as a guilty pleasure. I learned that an otherwise shitty day could be improved by what I made and ate; even if everything else was sucky, at least I had a nice meal. Deciding to get divorced was my precipitating event, but I think there’s universality in the way I think about cooking and eating. Anyone who has had to do a tough thing—leave a job, move, end a friendship, go through an illness or care for someone during theirs—can relate to what this book is about.
The book follows a loosely chronological arc, from the early, harder days, to a content time that opened up for me about a year later. I wrote about making food for others, others making food for me, my restaurant line cook experiences, college days, and the current period I was living through at the time, too. Throughout, all the stories (essays) include references to the food I was making at that time, and the corresponding recipes accompany each essay.
The endpapers are the first great thing you encounter when you open FIAF, colorful strips of masking tape labels from items in my kitchen. The book’s prop stylist, Nina Lalli, who is also my sister, took tape I’d been saving for months and arranged it into neat rows.
This is a different book in form and content than my other two, and I wanted it to feel different, too. I begged designer Zan Goodman at Zan Inc. to do another book with me (she art directed That Sounds So Good), and thank goddesses, she agreed. Zan is the best. I loved her concept for the look and feel. We started working on mood boards and vibe boards and chose our muses, and she set out to find a photographer.
Send to anyone who will appreciate this incredible tribe of muses.
We had exactly one meeting with Lucia Bell-Epstein and within minutes, knew she was the photographer for the project. Almost all of the photographs in FIAF were shot on film; I didn’t realize how different they’d print on the page until I saw them IRL, and now believe we’ve all destroyed our brains by looking at digital photographs on our devices for the last however many years. Story for another time.
In a fun twist, Nina famously hates silverware, and can become particularly inflamed by the thought of a whimsical pile of forks. I am at a point where I can’t abide seeing one more colorful napkin in a food photo. (We spent too much time on set for food stories.) I set a no-textiles rule. Nina kept the forks and spoons under lock and key. Our combined fatigue inspired a minimal style for the recipe beauties, and I can’t get enough of them—about half of the dishes were shot in this color-block style.
The other half of the dishes were shot in process, and I wanted them to be a little bit messy. I’m messy, this subject matter is a little messy, cooking at home is messy, and we did the entire shoot at my house. To write about an incredibly hard life transition and how it reconnected me to food and cooking, but portray it with images of food that are all buttoned up and perfect felt dissonant to me.
The cooking in this book is simple; only a couple of recipes are longer than one page. And for the first time ever, I didn’t include Spin Its. Not only are they a challenge for design, I decided that I’ve already given every Spin It for every ingredient I’ll ever use. If you’ve been cooking for me for a while, you already know that a leek is a good sub for an onion. Don’t get mad at me! I digitized all the Spin Its in a searchable tool here, and you don’t even have to ruffle through your books to find them.
The cover is a long story. The image you see is not the first one we submitted for approval. It’s not the second, third, fourth or fifth one. It’s the one I had to reconvene the entire crew for on a new day, five months after we’d wrapped the original shoot, to produce an image my publisher would approve. This cost me around $7000, and no, the publisher did not help offset that expense. I will tell that tale in a separate post, soon!
This is the first book I’ve ever published under my family name: Carla Lalli. Seeing my new (old) name on the cover was a big deal. As for the color, well—we think it’s going to be a huge year for purple people.
I’m happy to answer any other questions you might have about FIAF, what inspired it, how we shot and designed it, what my experience of writing it was like, how much things cost, and anything else you want to know.
All I ask in return is that you smash one of these preorder buttons, below.
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