Career Advice

I was driving Alex to the airport this evening (bummer bummer bummer, I miss that boy when he goes away), and we were talking about jobs and money and the future. He is running a tech startup that is doing well, and he was telling me about finding investors. These conversations have always seemed disconnected from my actual life, but tonight he surprised me.

"I sometimes think," I told him, "that if I could do anything at all that I might want to do, I would write books. I have that novel in progress, and I also started a book of food essays, and I have other ideas too." Alex jumped right on that food essays idea.

Do you know the Laurie Colwin essay collections, Home Cooking and More Home Cooking? They are comfort reads for me, and a couple of years ago I thought to myself, "I wish I had more books of food essays like these. Maybe I'll just have to write one." Kind of like the ones in the Laurie Colwin books, my draft essays are a mix of musings and how-to tips and paeans to my quirky kitchen favorites.

"You," he said, "are a very good writer, and good writing is sparse in food-focused corners of the internet." His plan: I start a food essays Substack, I build a reader base there, I get a book deal on the strength of my Substack writings. So far, so not-totally-implausible. But he's not done yet.

I also, in the Alex Plan for Mom's Next Act, hire a team to build me an app that will feature my putatively very good food writing. I said, "Alex, honey, my whole shtick would be 'let's build a thing with fun recipes and genuine if slightly quirky enthusiasm and zero autoplay videos ever.' I am not sure that long-form writing about food is very app-friendly." "Right," he said, "you'd be attracting an older market and they have more money to spend! Very attractive to investors." But you guys, in his vision I would be establishing a media empire. I pulled the emergency brake on the Vision Train when he started talking about Instagram. Alex is extraordinarily persuasive but there are limits.

"Alex," I said, "I don't ever want a big Instagram presence. Instagram makes people think they need Botox." "Well," he conceded, "you can hire out the Instagram stuff."

We were at the airport at that point, and I hugged him goodbye. I came home and peeked at the file called "Untitled book of food essays." I think that maybe this winter I will write a few more of them.