How does one ghostwrite a cookbook for a celebrity who subsists on kale salads, tequila, and chaos?

With superhuman patience and a tolerance for 3 a.m. texts about Olive Garden, perhaps—at least in the fictional world of Adam Roberts’ debut novel, Food Person (Knopf, May 20). The book follows a freshly unemployed food writer who reluctantly agrees to “ghost” for a starlet weathering a career slump. In a starred review, a Kirkus critic calls Food Person “a confection—satisfyingly over the top—but with complex notes.”

Unlike his struggling protagonist, Isabella Pasternak, Roberts has an established profile in food media: He founded his food blog, The Amateur Gourmet, in 2004 (it’s now a Substack newsletter), has three nonfiction books under his belt, and counts nearly 90,000 Instagram followers. The idea for Food Person came to him after—well, ghostwriting a cookbook for a celebrity, one he won’t name (“I signed an NDA”) but has only kind words for.

Roberts, 46, who holds an MFA in dramatic writing from New York University, says the road to getting the book published was a long one. “Before I wrote this novel, I wrote a whole other novel that I didn’t show anybody,” he says. To see Food Person come to life is “a dream,” but just as Roberts began promoting the book, he received some jarring news that lent gravity to the moment.

Roberts spoke from his Brooklyn home via Zoom. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How long did it take to write Food Person?

To write this book took a year but to write the novel took 46 years. [Laughs.] I had a lot of false starts and a lot of bad writing along the way that I shoved aside.

For this novel, I bought a marker board and mapped out the story in three acts, sort of like a screenplay. I wrote it in a couple of months, then I rewrote it. Then I had my husband read it, had some friends read it. Then I rewrote it again and sent it to my agent [Jenni Ferrari-Adler] and she said, “Let’s send it out.” It’s not like it happened quickly—it took a lot of work to get to that point.

What was your writing process like?

The best advice I got was from Stephen King’s book [On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft], which is to write 1,000 words a day. I do all my other stuff, such as the newsletter and emails, in the morning. Then I go to a coffee shop. I’ll drink an iced cortado in the summer, and a cappuccino or hot cortado in the winter, with oat milk. I won’t leave until I write 1,000 words. That’s the rule.

The great thing is that you wind up with clay, the raw ingredients. Once you have your first draft, then you can tear things out, move things around, rip it apart. The part I find difficult is reading [the first draft] back and not thinking it’s a piece of crap.

Which authors or books have inspired your writing?

I read Calvin Trillin’s Feeding a Yen, and I loved it. He writes about food in an unpretentious, personal, funny way. That was the gateway drug. From there, I loved Ruth Reichl’s books, specifically Comfort Me With Apples and Garlic and Sapphires. Nora Ephron’s Heartburn was maybe the first work of fiction I read about food that was so up my alley. It’s character driven, it’s emotional, but it integrates food in a way that feels central to the story.

In terms of fiction, my favorite writers are nothing like the kind of writing I do. They’re aspirational, like Nabokov, Philip Roth. I really like Tolstoy, which sounds pretentious, but I read War and Peace over the pandemic.

The book is peppered with references to the current food scene in New York City. How has food media evolved in New York from when you started your blog 21 years ago?

There was a hot moment where Eater New York, Grub Street, and all these websites were almost like gossip columns, like Page Six for chefs. There was this sense you were in a secret cabal of food people who cared about other food people.

I think the change that’s happened is that social media, TikTok and Instagram, have globalized this phenomenon so that it’s not centralized in New York anymore. Now, people are making videos all around the world and becoming personalities. I used to be so “in it” in terms of knowing who the people were, who the editors and writers were. Now, I literally have no idea who the most popular food people are because they’re all on platforms I don’t understand, like Twitch or Snapchat. I’m just saying, I feel old now. 

I lived in LA for 11 years and the food culture there was so small in terms of the people who populated it. When I moved back to New York two years ago, I felt like I was jumping into a crowded pool of people splashing around in all different areas. There are still so many people here working in food.

Recently, you posted on Instagram that while promoting your book, you received a surprising diagnosis.

I titled that post “Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud,” as that’s how it felt. I was having such an incredible experience: To write a novel and to have Knopf publish it and to go on a book tour was beyond any dream I ever could have had.

In the midst of it, literally the week that I launched the book and had two events in New York, I popped into the neurologist’s office because I had this tremor the doctor wanted me to get checked out. I was fully expecting them to just say, “Oh, that’s an essential tremor,” which is what my primary doctor thought it was. And they were like, “No, you’re showing all the signs of Parkinson’s.” It was a record-scratch moment.

I don’t feel mentally different. My cognitive stuff is great. The physical stuff will be a challenge. Right now, I have a tremor in my hand, but it doesn’t affect my typing or my ability to get around. As I go along, I may have to adapt the way I approach writing.

The funny thing is that I’ve never been into exercise, and this diagnosis has led me to exercise much more because it’s been proven to slow the progression of the disease. And so, in a funny twist, I feel great right now because I’m exercising.

What have you been eating this summer?

I’ve been eating a lot of yogurt bowls recently. It’s not that fancy, but I buy a lot of really good summer fruit, like greengage plums, beautiful yellow peaches, cherries. I’ve been swirling really good jam into yogurt, then I’ll slice up all this beautiful fruit as if I’m at a resort or something. I sprinkle it with granola, and I also have this thing called Yogurt Topping, from SOS Chefs [in New York City]. It’s the best post-exercise summer meal I could imagine.

Corin Hirsch is a writer in Vermont.