Book Description 

For fans of Alison Espach’s The Wedding People and Dolly Alderton’s Good Material, a delectable comedy of manners about cooking, ambition, and friendship set in the food world as a young and socially awkward writer takes a job ghostwriting the cookbook for a famous (and famously chaotic) Hollywood starlet.

Isabella Pasternack is a food person. She revels in the beauty of a perfectly cooked egg, she daydreams about her first meal at Chez Panisse, and every inch of her tiny apartment teems with cookbooks, from Prune to Cooking by Hand to Roast Chicken and Other Stories. What Isabella is not, unfortunately, is a gainfully employed person. In the wake of a disastrous live-streamed soufflé demonstration, Isabella is summarily fired from her job at a digital food magazine and must quickly find a way to keep herself in buckwheat and anchovy paste. When offered the opportunity to ghostwrite a cookbook for Molly Babcock, the once-beloved television actress now mired in scandal, Isabella warily accepts. Unfortunately, Molly quickly proves herself to be a nightmare collaborator: hungover, flaky, shallow, and—worst of all—indifferent to food. But between Molly’s bizarre late-night texts, goofy confessions, and impromptu road trips, Isabella reluctantly begins to see Molly’s charms. Can Isabella corral Molly out of the gossip rags and into the kitchen? Can she find the key to Molly’s heart and stomach? Or will Isabella’s devotion to her culinary idols and Molly’s monstrous ego send the entire cookbook—and both of their careers—up in flames?

A mouthwatering, hilarious debut peppered with insider food world detail—the real writers behind celebrity chef cookbooks, the hot restaurants that run on the backs of their sous-chefs, the secret to perfect blinis à la Russe—Adam Roberts’s Food Person is a literary soufflé—a deceptively light, deliciously rich, showstopping confection.

My Review 

Isabella is a bit of a mess, but she’s still likeable. She’s extremely knowledgeable, so when she gets fired after flubbing her live demo, it’s crushing. Redemption comes wrapped up in the form of a ghostwriting gig, but it’s certainly not going to be easy. 

Celebrity Molly is a disastrous hot mess and she is NOT easy to work with, especially when she has bizarre rules about not wanting anyone cooking in her gorgeous gourmet kitchen or her reluctance to include any actual recipes in her cookbook. Molly is self-centered and spoiled and simultaneously wants nothing to do with the book while retaining complete control over the book. 

I’m examining Molly through a critical lens, but I don’t mean to imply that Isabella is perfect. She certainly has her flaws, and her story ARC is more complicated and takes a different trajectory than one might expect. 

I would absolutely recommend Food Person. It’s pretty good for a debut book. This was an interesting book about love of food and celebrity culture and being full of ideas yet still aimless. It’s a book about finding yourself and nightmare bosses and trying to make it on your own. I am looking forward to reading more from Roberts in the future.    

I received a digital ARC of this book from Knopf/NetGalley