In the winter of 2012, as my fiftieth birthday approached, I began to write what turned into my autobiography, a look at my own life through the lens of food.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My 50th birthday approaching felt like a big milestone to me. I've lived half a century. If I write about food and use my life as a fulcrum to move the story along, maybe I've lived long enough to fashion a narrative that has a happy ending.
My autobiography was simply the story of my life.
Most people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I discovered that nothing interesting had ever happened to me. So I had to take the situation and invent stories to go with it.
An autobiography is a life story. It starts when you're born and continues until the end.
In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood - I made it into a mystery story.
I think I wrote my first piece about food in 1978.
All through my writing life, I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
I've always loved to write, and I kept a diary of what I thought about my business, being an entrepreneur and other things of interest to me.
I got out of autobiography because my story is, I was famous, it was hard for me, I got into therapy. I had trouble with food, I got a nutritionist. There's no story there.
And then I wrote my first autobiography when I - well, it was 23 years ago. And since then I've written about one book every two years.