Our conversation made me feel guilty. How dare I turn my back on a good thing? Choking on tears, I accepted her doubts about my choice. Eventually I relented. She’s right. I hate her at the moment, but she’s probably right.
My heart shriveled in defeat. We finally said good-bye, both of us angry at the other, and I walked into the living room. I admitted to Daniel, wearily, that I had reconsidered. I was going to accept the job in Connecticut. His eyes softened, his face pained to see my frustration. “Kiddo, you know, you don’t have to. You’re an adult now; you can do what you want to do. She’ll understand eventually.”
I pressed my lips together, the bottom one beginning to tremble. “I know.” I nodded. “But I care too much what she thinks of me. More than anything, I just don’t want to disappoint her.”
He sighed, knowing it was hopeless to try to convince me otherwise.
“And she’s given me everything. I want her to be proud of what I’ve done with my life.”
One week later I swirled my signature on the bottom line of a six-month lease in Hamden, Connecticut. Daniel and I looked at each other. How lucky I was that he’d up and move so often with me. As I looked into his eyes, my heart filled. He’s good to me, I thought. He’d run clear across the earth if he thought it’d make me happy. The way he loved me was all consuming, unconditional.
How does he love me like this? I’d wonder. In the mornings, I’d wake to a new handwritten note. Something on the order of “Give ’em hell today. I love you”; or “I love you even though you have the biggest feet I’ve ever seen. Seriously, it’s alarming”; or “I won’t tell anyone that you chew in your sleep. They wouldn’t understand. I love you.”
I felt lucky that he had a profession that allowed him to move as often as I forced us to. Professional poker is good like that. In fact, it was on a trip we’d taken to Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker, just after we’d gotten back together, that I realized the extent of his love for me. Our second day there, my digital camera’s battery died, so I resorted to snapping photos with Daniel’s iPhone. Days later, nearing the end of our trip, he handed me his phone and told me to e-mail the pictures I’d taken to both of our Gmail accounts. Scanning the ones I’d taken during that week—dozens of fuzzy photos taken of food and pools and quasi-prostitutes—I found more I’d never realized he’d taken. Dozens of photos of an unknowing me.
At first I was taken aback by the rawness of a pajama-ed, wild-haired me. Unposed and unprepared. In the photos, I was doing everything from eating to reading to sleeping. I laughed as I thumbed through them. I looked terrible.
In one picture, I drank tea from a sixteen-ounce glass measuring cup. In another, I sat on our kitchen counter, eating frozen strawberries from a party-size bowl. Another showed me drinking water wearing a T-shirt Mom had bought me as a souvenir from a trip. The shirt read “Somebody who loves me very much went to Canada and got me this shirt.” Priceless. In yet another photo, I crouched on the kitchen floor, smiling and looking crazy-eyed through the glass door of the oven to watch cupcakes rise.
And then I realized that these photographs were quite special. Because they captured the days I didn’t think to document. Those times that went unmentioned, seemingly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Somehow they spoke volumes about my identity. Random images taken throughout the last year. They didn’t have stories and archived memories; they were simply the in-betweens of my life. Each was weird but also revealing.
What was most interesting about those photographs wasn’t that they were a sneak peek inside my daily life, but that Daniel found my life worth documenting. Not what I looked like or what I was doing in particular, but my zaniness. The quirks. The simple facts that I tuck my thermal pants into my socks and sit cross-legged in front of my oven door to watch my own baking projects.
In not even one photo was I dressed well. What about that time I wore a dress? Each was just something he found special somehow.
And now, looking through them all, I realized how lucky I was. He’d moved from Amherst to Cambridge to Philadelphia, and now to one forgettable town in Connecticut, just to be with me. And I loved him for it. Because even when that Connecticut movie crumbled, when the production was abruptly shut down in January and I lost my job because the studio and the director couldn’t come to an agreement on budget, Daniel smiled and offered reassuringly, “The bright side is that now you can start your blog.”
The Monday that my first unemployment check arrived in the mail, I figured I had nothing to lose. I chose a free WordPress.com design, and Can You Stay for Dinner?—a name Daniel suggested—was born. At the beginning, I posted three times a day. I wanted to document the meals I ate daily to show how a person can lose weight and keep it off while still eating deliciously. It was to be a journal of my life through food. It was the long-winded answer to the questions I was often asked after losing weight. “How did you do it?” and “So … what do you eat?” and “What should I eat to lose weight?”
The challenge was avoiding health zealotry. I feared the self-righteous air that might exist on a blog that shares my path, my lifestyle. If I were to be too dogmatic, or if I set out a rigid list of diet rules, my message would be impractical and impersonal. For those reasons, I kept away from being too prescriptive when writing about weight loss. I needed readers to know that I was not a registered dietitian, not a licensed therapist, not aware of their unique complexities, their individual bodies, and, most glaringly—I wasn’t even that good at turning down a cupcake. I was simply one person who happened to have lots of history and personal experience with dieting, losing weight, and learning to love her whole self.
So the blog was created with the sole intention to show rather than tell. Simply to be an illustration of me, painted colorfully in food. I hoped that the sharing of my reflections and recipes would mean something to others. I wanted readers to gain from what I’d lost, to develop an understanding of how I’d managed to change my life with food.
To do this, I asked them to stay for dinner. I invited readers into my home and showed them my breakfast, my salad at lunch, and my dinner, because I thought, Well, I’m making it anyway, eating it anyway … might as well photograph it.
I loved cooking and eating enough to snap an obscene number of photos of anything and everything edible in my home. I found something stylish, something sexy, in every picture, and I posted them for the world to see. I loved blogging immediately. The sharing, the give-and-take of commenting, the sense of community. A whole new world opened up.
I knew I had things to say about gaining and losing and maintaining that others might want to hear. And I knew that the things I’d say would not always make sense, not always be valuable to everyone. But I also knew that, at the very least, putting my feelings out there would be therapeutic.
And so I blogged every day. Before long, I began to receive comments and e-mails that made me glow from the inside out. Strangers told me their stories about food and weight; they related to me; they thanked me for putting myself out there in such a vulnerable way. The conversation, the staying for dinner—it made me the happiest I’d ever been.
Two months into the blog, our lease in Connecticut was nearing its end. I was committed to blogging, and I wanted the next job I took to be in line with food and writing. Daniel and I debated where to move next. San Francisco? Too expensive. Chicago? Too central, too landlocked. Down south? Too polite, too hot. And then Seattle came to mind. Our friend Justin had moved out there after college. He’d fallen in love with a girl, and they’d chosen to spend a few years in the Pacific Northwest, where she was from. He told us how fantastic it was.
I knew that the food culture there would be perfect for a wannabe food writer. For someone obsessed with cooking and all things edible, Pike Place Market would be a dream. Plus, I’d always had a fascination with the Northwest. I’d always wanted to travel west and live on the Pacific side of the United States, and this could be a great new adventure.
> Weeks later, after selling all our belongings, we bought one-way tickets to Seattle. Telling Mom sent me into an anxiety attack. What will she think? She won’t like it … Am I making a mistake? I went back and forth, thinking of all her reactions to life changes I’d made throughout the years since becoming an adult.
When I was eighteen, I pierced my nose. Mom lay in her bed and cried for two hours.
At nineteen, I told her I didn’t want to pursue the honors track in college because “Who cares?” Mom lay in her bed and cried for two hours.
At twenty, I lost 135 pounds. Mom lay in her bed and cried for two hours.
At twenty-one, I told her I was deeply sad and didn’t know how to go on. Mom lay in her bed and cried for two hours.
At twenty-three, I told her I’d just spent the night chatting with Leonardo DiCaprio and laughing with Mark Ruffalo on the set of Shutter Island. Mom was so excited and overwhelmed she lay in her bed and cried for two hours.
At twenty-four, I told her I was moving to Philadelphia to work on another film, but this time with Jack Nicholson and Paul Rudd. Mom lay in her bed and cried for two hours.
That same year, I told her I was going to stop working in film and start writing. A cooking blog. Not knowing what a blog was, Mom convinced me otherwise and then lay in her bed and cried for two hours.
At twenty-five, I called her to tell her I had sold my belongings and was moving to Seattle. Just because I could and I wanted to and I’d already made up my mind. Mom said, “Okay, follow your heart.”
And I did.
She kissed me at the flight gate. “I’m so proud of you. Just remember, you can always come home.” She fought back tears, as hard as I fought mine. I knew that at first she had only come around to the idea of blogging because I’d lost my job. She would never have consented for me to walk away from something stable, something more prestigious than cooking and clicking away at my computer—not when she knew what it was like to need a steady paycheck. But now, I had no other options. A month after I’d begun Can You Stay for Dinner? she called me to say “It’s incredible.”
“You mean that?” I asked her.
“I do. You’re a writer, Andrea, and I guess I’m just figuring that out.”
It was Mom and Paul who became my biggest fans—the ones who checked the site for updates three times every day, who called me constantly to comment, who told everyone they knew about it with pride. Paul would e-mail me a picture of a perfectly grilled steak with the caption “Thought this would be great for the blog!” while Mom would mail me pretty place mats and colorful dishes for food photography. Their support encouraged me to keep writing.
For the first time in quite a while, I felt secure. There I was, twenty-five, having lost a lot in life: my front teeth on the seesaw, my first spelling bee, my dad, 135 pounds, multiple pairs of sunglasses, and, most often, my way.
What I’d come to realize as I left for Seattle is that the gentle sensation of ants in my pants at all times is just letting me know I’m alive. That I’m on the verge. Of doing stuff. Or not. But just that there’s something ahead.
I’m being reminded to take chances, to make illegal turns a time or ten, to crash, fail, and seriously consider a fallback plan at Starbucks.
I couldn’t have said—in that moment or any other—that I always knew the right choice. I never did. I never do. I’d made Mom cry a thousand times. Salty joy and pain. But as I waved to her on my way through security, she and I both smiled.
SEATTLE WAS PRECISELY THE PICTURE that people painted it to be: mountains and water and nothing but lush, lush greenery. And hipsters. So many hipsters. And though the landscape took my breath away, it was the culture that I truly fell for. I found a life in and through and made of food.
When Daniel and I stepped off the plane with nowhere to live, we set up temporary residence at the Holiday Inn on Aurora. In the mornings, while Daniel slept, I’d venture out to some local coffee shop to blog. After a couple of days, I started browsing online for possible jobs. On Craigslist, an ad read, “Hiring a social media intern interested in food and writing.” New to the whole social media scene, but proving adept at building a blog audience, I applied. Much of me felt certain I’d never get the internship, never even hear back from the company, Foodista, a two-year-old cooking website, though I loved the idea of working there. Surfing around the site, I was smitten. The design was clean and unpretentious. There was a question-and-answer forum where the community of users posted and answered food and cooking questions. And unlike other recipe sites I frequented, Foodista was a food encyclopedia as well. A Wikipedia of food, I’d come to realize five minutes into cruising its pages.
I assumed my luck would be similar to what it was with the slew of other jobs I’d applied for after graduating, which is to say, nonexistent. Surely they’d received résumés from dozens of people more qualified for the position. Still, it was worth a shot. After hitting Send on my reply, I went about exploring the Emerald City.
I’d all but forgotten about my application until three days later, when I checked my e-mail after a long afternoon walk with Daniel. In my Inbox sat a reply from the community outreach director at Foodista. An hour later, we were on the phone for an hour-long interview. Two days later, I was entering their building for an interview with the cofounder and CEO, Barnaby Dorfman. For nearly two hours, he and I sat in the open urban loft space and talked about the job, my work in film and his work with IMDb (the Internet Movie Database), our mutual fascination with the Pacific Northwest, the few years he’d spent living in New England while attending Dartmouth, his childhood in Manhattan, and all things food. We were alike in so many ways. Barnaby was down-to-earth and casual, and also very, very smart—almost exhaustive in the span of his knowledge. When I left the office, I was sure the meeting had gone as well as a meeting possibly could. I wanted the job more than I’d gone in wanting it.
On Monday, three days later, I was hired. On Tuesday, Daniel and I said farewell to suitcase living at the Holiday Inn and moved into our first Seattle apartment, sitting elegantly on the top of Queen Anne’s highest hill. And Wednesday I began what would be one of my most passionate career choices. Foodista was small enough that I felt at home in the office. I’d always considered myself a people person, but these people—my seven colleagues—were a rarity. Within my first few days of work, I’d settled into a delicious comfort with each of them. Barnaby, Sheri, Colin, Karlyn, Jesse, Patrick, and Jeff. They came to be my family.
After a month of proving myself to be a hardworking part of the team, I was promoted to a full-time staff member and assigned even greater editorial responsibility. I advanced from blogging once weekly to controlling all social media—everything from Facebook to Twitter. When the vice president of the company, Sheri, took her maternity leave, I was allowed a heavy hand in planning Foodista’s renowned annual events, the International Food Blogger Conferences. For these, I sought out more than a dozen local chefs, restaurants, and even street food trucks to come and serve food during the weekend-long conference.
My work there fell neatly in line with all that I was doing in my personal life. The blog, the social media, the events—the fusion of passions couldn’t have made more sense for me at the time. Each piece that I was working on synchronized with another. I’d also found a network of like-minded food friends. Seattle felt like destiny’s gift, all of it existing in oddly perfect harmony. I was happy, intensely happy.
And the blog—my baby if ever I’d known one—grew. I fell deeper in love with writing. I poured my energy, all my eccentric intensity, into developing recipes, crafting stories, telling my own truth about weight loss and maintenance.
A few times a week, my coworkers and I would walk to one of our favorite restaurants near the office for lunch. Often our cravings united for the tacos at Barracuda Taqueria—two small, fresh corn tortillas piled with limey cabbage slaw and plump sautéed shrimp, drizzled with avocado crema. When Mexican wasn’t the vibe, we opted for
Vietnamese. Steaming bowls of pho made with spicy pineapple- and beef-flavored broth, filled to the brim with vegetables and tofu, thin rice noodles, and topped with crispy bean sprouts, fresh Thai basil, and hot chili sauce. This exotic bowlful had become my go-to comfort food on the days when it poured down rain outside.
On weekends, I cooked with the same zeal I’d discovered in Philly and Rome. I went to the outdoor farmers’ markets in Fremont and Ballard, finding kindred spirits in Seattleites, most of whom were as interested in organics and food ethics as I was. I loved seeing the fresh ingredients around me, especially the seasonal produce. It seemed as though everything I could want was grown locally in the Pacific Northwest. And I came to credit those vegetables that I bought every Sunday with helping me to be able to eat what I wanted.
In the process of losing and maintaining my weight, I had long thought that fruits and vegetables made eating healthy easier. It was their fibrous, filling nature. I tried pairing whatever meal I craved with a mound of vegetables. It mattered less what was gracing one side of my plate, and more that the other side was overpopulated with plants. But it wasn’t until I arrived in Seattle that I discovered I could enjoy those vegetables all the time. There I found ones I loved and discovered new ways to make them delicious. Caramelized brussels sprouts, sweet early peas, grilled white corn on the cob, and roasted butternut squash. I didn’t just quarantine a green on my dinner plate and promise to eat it for health’s sake. I found out which vegetables tasted best to me, and which methods of preparing them made them as lovely as what I’d find in restaurants. And I experimented. I bought a new and different veggie each week. I used herbs and spices and introduced butter as a flavor rather than a foundation. I learned that roasting vegetables develops a sweetness without adding sugar. I was continually inspired to try out recipes and techniques, knowing that at least half the fun in cooking was the ideation beforehand.
Each night as I prepared dinner, I made it a point to balance that perfect square of cheesy lasagna, those two slices of my favorite homemade spicy caramelized-onion pizza, the chicken with mustard marsala sauce with at least double that of vegetables. When Daniel and I went out to eat at our favorite diner, the 5 Spot, I started with a salad and ate half of my burger, then shared my ancho-dusted fries with him. I brought my leftovers home for another meal. I felt content to eat whatever I wanted within reason because I didn’t worry about whether a small portion would leave me hungry; the vegetables took care of that.
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