On Gwyneth Paltrow and Reading My Book Out Loud

So that pile of papers is…my book!

In the biz, we call this “First Pass.” The manuscript has been revised, copy-edited, fact-checked and typeset… so this was the first time I got to read my words on pages that look like actual book pages, not a Word document. This is the second time I’ve edited a hard copy — I printed the whole Word doc out to line edit before I submitted my first draft last fall. But I did something a little different this time, which was to read the whole manuscript out loud. I got this tip from Anna Quindlen when I heard her interviewed on my favorite writing podcast; apparently she always reads her manuscripts out loud in their entirety. It sounds sort of obvious, but I can see why most people don’t do it. It is surprisingly exhausting to read a whole book out loud. One chapter takes several hours when you’re stopping to edit and also drink a lot of water. It took me the better part of two weeks to get through the whole thing.

But it was excellent advice. I found I caught far more mistakes and word reps and run-on sentences than I ever do reading silently. So much so that I am now slightly despairing that galleys (advance reading copies — the things that look a lot more like books but don’t have hard covers) are made from these First Pass pages before all my corrections went in. So if you get a galley from me in the next few weeks, please know the final book really is going to be oh so much better and maybe don’t even really read the galley, but just admire it from afar? (Unless I’m asking you to blurb, of course. And even then, maybe sort of skim?)


In other news, Gwyneth Paltrow just discovered orthorexia. Imagine me rolling my eyes allll the way back in my head, or just go read my take on Instagram.

Oh and click here for some things you can read — silently or out loud, your choice — while you're waiting to read my book.

PS. Saw the tragic news about Anthony Bourdain's suicide just before hitting send on this. It sounds cliched, but Kitchen Confidential was an early influence on the kind of writer I decided to be (and not to be). I am stunned and saddened once again to see how opaque and ruthless the cloud of mental illness can be, even for people who should be able to access every kind of good help. I didn't agree with everything Bourdain wrote — or the way he glamorized the restaurant world's toxic masculinity culture in Kitchen Confidential and elsewhere — but the way he responded to the #MeToo movement (within the food industry and more broadly) was spot on. "I stand unhesitatingly and unwaveringly with the women," Bourdain wrote on Medium a few months ago. Bourdain's ability to be an ally and voice for change on these issues will be missed; and of course, his friends and family will miss him even more.

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