Welcome to On Eating (And Writing)

Hello!

If you're receiving this email, it's because you long ago subscribed to my blog, or much more recently subscribed to this newsletter. (Thank you!) But you might be wondering why I've started a newsletter since I'm in the midst of researching and writing my first book. (Ahem. Not technically my first book, just the first with my name on the cover. I'd tell you about the others, but then I'd have to kill you. #ghostwriterlife)

But the thing about writing a book is that you only have that one big manuscript deadline looming in the distance. After 11 years of writing for magazines, websites and newspapers, I'm used to weekly article deadlines. I like weekly article deadlines, except on Thursday nights. They give my life structure. I also like to talk about the things I'm reading, learning and writing. Enter this newsletter: The perfect way to keep me accountable to an audience during the otherwise murky process of book-writing, and share little bits of what I'm researching and writing as we go along.

There is also an ulterior motive, of course, which is to get you stoked about the book itself, so that you'll be dying to read it by the time it actually hits bookstore shelves. But I promise there's even more in it for you, if you've ever been curious to peek behind the scenes of a writer's life, or if you're interested in how we learn to eat and the various dysfunctions of our cultural relationship with food. That's what the book is about and it will be the "on eating" part of this newsletter. Expect to hear lots more about it in the coming emails.

In the meantime, if you'd like to read something really amazing, make it Rivers Solomon's New York Times essay on trying to eat with Type 2 Diabetes:

Diabetes demands perfection, and I am the most imperfect person I know. When eating becomes this exhausting, I simply refrain from food altogether. There is no more surefire way to blood-glucose control than starvation, and I’ve gone months eating only a small bowl of chicken soup a day, had doctors praise my impressive management.

Thanks so much for subscribing — and please tell your friends!

-Virginia

(From top: My step-grandma, U.T. Miller Summers, who was an author, book editor, and newspaper columnist; photo from her archives. Me by Red Anchor Photo.)