I am a writer who hates to write. I will do anything to avoid writing. But my new book The Paris Novel was such a pleasure.
I don’t know what happened, but I would pick up my computer every day and walk out to my studio and say to my family: “Now I’m going to Paris.” I just wrapped myself around those characters. All of Paris is a pleasure to me.
Even though my novel is set in the eighties, many of the restaurants mentioned, like and , are still places I eat at every time I go. Another place I like is . He’s the most astonishing chef.
He’s had three stars for a million years and keeps challenging himself, reinventing his cuisine. The only way to stay young is to keep doing things you don’t know how to do. I don’t like doing things that scare me, but I feel like it’s the only way to live.
"I don’t like doing things that scare me, but I feel like it’s the only way to live" When I lived on a commune in California in the seventies, there were . Everybody would pitch in with the cooking then we’d sit down and could be there for hours, talking about everything that was happening in our lives. It made me see that food is what brings people together.
One meal that has always stayed with me was back before smartphones allowed you to look everything up. My son Nick was about 10 and we were in this beautiful seaside town, Sperlonga, between Naples and Rome. We had reservations for a famous restaurant but as we wandered up whitewashed steps, we saw a fisherman car.