Latest news with #LonelyMouth
Sydney Morning Herald
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Two journalists, an eclectic restaurant and Taylor Swift: Inside the making of Jac Maley's new book
Lunch begins with an editorial intervention. 'I want to say, for the record,' Jacqueline Maley – ever the journalist – announces. 'That this was on my vision board before Tay Tay came. I was so on the zeitgeist.' We're dining at Pellegrino 2000, tucked inside a historic terrace in Surry Hills, where the vibe is old-school Italian with a wink. Chianti bottles sit like trophies, tomato tins masquerade as rustic decor, and ropes of dried herbs and spices dangle above the bar. An eccentric collection of framed artwork lines the walls – including an image of the Michelin Man, beaming over the room like an ironic deity, blessing the carb-loading faithful below. It's theatrical, yet charming. The perfect setting for a pop star – or, in Maley's case, her second novel, Lonely Mouth. Long before Taylor Swift and her gal pal Sabrina Carpenter turned the restaurant into pop culture real estate when they spent the first night of their Eras and Sydney Zoo tour here, Maley was already a regular. She started visiting for the relaxed refinement and crema caramello alla banana (accompanied, no hyperbole, by an entire plate of cream!), but she kept visiting once she realised Pellegrino 2000 also served up perfect inspiration for a novel. 'It's one of my favourite Sydney restaurants,' Maley says. 'The restaurant I had in mind for the novel was elegant and cool, but it was never going to try too hard or be like a white tablecloth place. I love good food, but I hate any stuffy atmosphere.' Maley would sit at the bar, sketching details in a notepad, absorbing the restaurant's textures and rhythms. In Lonely Mouth, Pellegrino 2000 becomes the inspiration for the fictional Bocca – an Italian restaurant with a Japanese twist and a trattoria-meets–art deco aesthetic, located in Darlinghurst. Her narrator, Matilda, works there as the manager: a sharp and solitary 30-something nursing an unrequited crush on the restaurant's bad-boy owner, Colson, and quietly shouldering the aftershocks of her mother leaving her and her sister, Lara, when they were children (made doubly traumatic by the fact it happened outside the Big Merino rest stop at Goulburn, off the Hume Highway). As a menu reduces a sauce, so too does a plot summary flatten Lonely Mouth. It's a novel, rich with humour and sharp observations, about desire – for food, for love, for life – and what happens when that desire gets swallowed. It's about sisters, and mothers and daughters. And Bocca becomes more than a backdrop: it's a space where chaos meets order, appetite meets discipline, and everyone's slightly hungry for something they can't quite name. 'I knew I wanted to set the novel in a restaurant. I thought it would be a dynamic setting,' Maley says. 'I wanted it to be very realistic. I really wanted the restaurant to be like a character in the book, to be so atmospheric, it would take people there.' How many times did she visit Pellegrino 2000? 'You should ask my accountant when I put through my next tax return,' Maley quips. Mercifully, we avoid the worst part of Lunch Withs – the stilted pas de deux over the menu, the self-consciousness of wondering if one's contributions to the ordering are too much, too little, too indulgent, too virtuous. Maley takes full control, like someone who has asked far tougher questions than 'shared plates or mains'? To start, we opt for a pillowy focaccia and truffle-parmesan, an unexpectedly punchy caponata due to pickled celery, and a lush buffalo mozzarella, adorned with figs and honey. The wine stays on theme – a glass of Italian Pinot Grigio and a sharp Catarratto. Photographer Steven Siewert hovers nearby like a set designer reworking a diorama – moving errant phones out of frames, opening blinds for better light, repositioning cutlery with surgical precision. 'It is weird to be on the receiving end of what we usually do to other people,' Maley says. She has a deadline for her own Lunch With interview, with a senior public figure, looming. After completing an arts law degree, Maley started at The Sydney Morning Herald as a cadet in 2003. She comes from media stock: her mother, Judy, to whom Lonely Mouth is dedicated, worked at the Herald; her great-grandfather and great-uncle were political journalists; and her brother, Paul, was a reporter at The Australian. Maley's a senior writer, columnist, podcast host and newsletter editor and, today, the unfortunate soul sitting on the wrong side of the notepad. Yet, Maley's not entirely unprepared. This isn't our first time at the Lunch With table together. When her debut novel, The Truth About Her, came out in 2021, we met for breakfast in a courtyard of a cafe that was a little more toast crumbs than terrazzo tables. Now look at us: dining in a hot spot frequented by actual celebrities. For everyone's sake, I suggest Maley consider setting her next novel in a five-star resort. 'We're cosmopolitan ladies of the world now,' Maley retorts. 'I think we need to really level up. I'm thinking ... Denmark. What's that place? Noma.' The three-Michelin-star restaurant serves 20-course meals and regularly tops lists of the best restaurants in the world. For Lonely Mouth, Maley became something of a restaurant obsessive – fascinated by the ecosystems they contain and the quiet dramas unfolding between courses. She interviewed chefs and hospitality managers, read a stack of chef memoirs, watched YouTube videos of kitchens in action – and, for balance, quite a bit of The Great British Bake Off (the latter more for pleasure). In full Daniel Day-Lewis mode, she even picked up a few waitressing shifts. 'They were sort of a bit bemused, but they were nice about it. I just did what I was told. I think the other waiters were like: Who is this lady? But everyone tolerated me,' Maley says. 'People open up when you take a real interest in them, their lives, what they want to do, what they have done, the thing they are passionate about, and ask them to explain it to you. People were really giving that way, even though it was a weird ask, and no one really knew what I was doing.' It wasn't quite Down and Out in Paris, but the experience gave Maley what she needed: a feel for the choreography, the repetition, the small tensions and quiet triumphs of restaurant life. What surprised her was how much it resembled a newsroom – fast-paced, hierarchical, and always one dropped order away from chaos. 'It's a structured environment, but it attracts people who are unstructured in other ways. It's a little like journalism and a newsroom in that way,' she says. 'Journalists are not people who want to work a 9 to 5 job, they're in for the experience and the adventure. We're solo operators, but we have to work within an organism, which is the newsroom. Newspapers are very hierarchical, even though we're all recalcitrant personalities who don't like being told what to do.' With classic recalcitrance, I break the fourth wall to ask our off-duty journalist if she's enjoying her turn in the Lunch With hot seat. 'Are you checking in?,' Maley jokes. 'It's going great for me, but am I giving you what you need?' A master of the form, I ask Maley for her Lunch With advice – she's got the recipe down, but I'm probably still chopping onions. 'Just get them really drunk,' she deadpans. 'It's quite high pressure, I think. It's like a social interaction on the surface, but your journalist brain is constantly working. ' A pause in proceedings: the main. Pappardelle with stracciatella and truss tomatoes so ripe they look ready to explode on impact. Maley unfolds a paper napkin and tucks it, bib-style, into the relaxed collar of her blue silk shirt. She catches my eye – the journalist's brain, even now, still quietly whirring. 'Can you not put this in the piece?' A pause, a sigh, a smile. 'No, you can, if you want.' The same brain – always scanning for angles and incoming alerts– makes it hard for Maley to write fiction while working her day job. Journalism brings a constant overload of information, paired with the nagging sense you're always missing something important. And while her reporting and novels both circle themes of gender and power, she doesn't see them as flexing the same muscle. Her ideal writing conditions are long, uninterrupted stretches away from work, not trying to wedge sentences between school drop-offs, play dates, early dog walks and breaking news alerts. Annual leave became writing leave – less a break than a change of deadlines. There was also the pressure of following up the success of her first novel and being contracted to a deadline as part of a two-book deal – a deadline she fell so far behind on that she can't even precisely remember when it was. 'I didn't take a holiday in years,' Maley says. 'So I ended up, at the end of it, realising it's quite hard to juggle all of this. It took a toll on me in terms of stress levels, and so that was something that I wouldn't want to do again. ' She's got ideas bubbling away – another novel, maybe a non-fiction project – but for now, she's letting them simmer. And at least restaurants are just restaurants again, no longer research sites in disguise. Loading 'I love cooking, I love gardening. I want to take my dog for a walk, I want to watch TV,' Maley says. 'When you're writing a book, every time you're home, it's always there. And now I'm like, I want to do non-intellectual pursuits for a while.' But first, we have a joint byline to get. As a friendly waitress delivers an unplanned – but not unwanted – tiramisu, we seize the opportunity to try to get a scoop. Did Taylor Swift enjoy a tiramisu when she dined here? The response, cool and non-committal: 'Taylor Swift, who's that? I couldn't possibly say.'
The Age
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
Two journalists, an eclectic restaurant and Taylor Swift: Inside the making of Jac Maley's new book
Lunch begins with an editorial intervention. 'I want to say, for the record,' Jacqueline Maley – ever the journalist – announces. 'That this was on my vision board before Tay Tay came. I was so on the zeitgeist.' We're dining at Pellegrino 2000, tucked inside a historic terrace in Surry Hills, where the vibe is old-school Italian with a wink. Chianti bottles sit like trophies, tomato tins masquerade as rustic decor, and ropes of dried herbs and spices dangle above the bar. An eccentric collection of framed artwork lines the walls – including an image of the Michelin Man, beaming over the room like an ironic deity, blessing the carb-loading faithful below. It's theatrical, yet charming. The perfect setting for a pop star – or, in Maley's case, her second novel, Lonely Mouth. Long before Taylor Swift and her gal pal Sabrina Carpenter turned the restaurant into pop culture real estate when they spent the first night of their Eras and Sydney Zoo tour here, Maley was already a regular. She started visiting for the relaxed refinement and crema caramello alla banana (accompanied, no hyperbole, by an entire plate of cream!), but she kept visiting once she realised Pellegrino 2000 also served up perfect inspiration for a novel. 'It's one of my favourite Sydney restaurants,' Maley says. 'The restaurant I had in mind for the novel was elegant and cool, but it was never going to try too hard or be like a white tablecloth place. I love good food, but I hate any stuffy atmosphere.' Maley would sit at the bar, sketching details in a notepad, absorbing the restaurant's textures and rhythms. In Lonely Mouth, Pellegrino 2000 becomes the inspiration for the fictional Bocca – an Italian restaurant with a Japanese twist and a trattoria-meets–art deco aesthetic, located in Darlinghurst. Her narrator, Matilda, works there as the manager: a sharp and solitary 30-something nursing an unrequited crush on the restaurant's bad-boy owner, Colson, and quietly shouldering the aftershocks of her mother leaving her and her sister, Lara, when they were children (made doubly traumatic by the fact it happened outside the Big Merino rest stop at Goulburn, off the Hume Highway). As a menu reduces a sauce, so too does a plot summary flatten Lonely Mouth. It's a novel, rich with humour and sharp observations, about desire – for food, for love, for life – and what happens when that desire gets swallowed. It's about sisters, and mothers and daughters. And Bocca becomes more than a backdrop: it's a space where chaos meets order, appetite meets discipline, and everyone's slightly hungry for something they can't quite name. 'I knew I wanted to set the novel in a restaurant. I thought it would be a dynamic setting,' Maley says. 'I wanted it to be very realistic. I really wanted the restaurant to be like a character in the book, to be so atmospheric, it would take people there.' How many times did she visit Pellegrino 2000? 'You should ask my accountant when I put through my next tax return,' Maley quips. Mercifully, we avoid the worst part of Lunch Withs – the stilted pas de deux over the menu, the self-consciousness of wondering if one's contributions to the ordering are too much, too little, too indulgent, too virtuous. Maley takes full control, like someone who has asked far tougher questions than 'shared plates or mains'? To start, we opt for a pillowy focaccia and truffle-parmesan, an unexpectedly punchy caponata due to pickled celery, and a lush buffalo mozzarella, adorned with figs and honey. The wine stays on theme – a glass of Italian Pinot Grigio and a sharp Catarratto. Photographer Steven Siewert hovers nearby like a set designer reworking a diorama – moving errant phones out of frames, opening blinds for better light, repositioning cutlery with surgical precision. 'It is weird to be on the receiving end of what we usually do to other people,' Maley says. She has a deadline for her own Lunch With interview, with a senior public figure, looming. After completing an arts law degree, Maley started at The Sydney Morning Herald as a cadet in 2003. She comes from media stock: her mother, Judy, to whom Lonely Mouth is dedicated, worked at the Herald; her great-grandfather and great-uncle were political journalists; and her brother, Paul, was a reporter at The Australian. Maley's a senior writer, columnist, podcast host and newsletter editor and, today, the unfortunate soul sitting on the wrong side of the notepad. Yet, Maley's not entirely unprepared. This isn't our first time at the Lunch With table together. When her debut novel, The Truth About Her, came out in 2021, we met for breakfast in a courtyard of a cafe that was a little more toast crumbs than terrazzo tables. Now look at us: dining in a hot spot frequented by actual celebrities. For everyone's sake, I suggest Maley consider setting her next novel in a five-star resort. 'We're cosmopolitan ladies of the world now,' Maley retorts. 'I think we need to really level up. I'm thinking ... Denmark. What's that place? Noma.' The three-Michelin-star restaurant serves 20-course meals and regularly tops lists of the best restaurants in the world. For Lonely Mouth, Maley became something of a restaurant obsessive – fascinated by the ecosystems they contain and the quiet dramas unfolding between courses. She interviewed chefs and hospitality managers, read a stack of chef memoirs, watched YouTube videos of kitchens in action – and, for balance, quite a bit of The Great British Bake Off (the latter more for pleasure). In full Daniel Day-Lewis mode, she even picked up a few waitressing shifts. 'They were sort of a bit bemused, but they were nice about it. I just did what I was told. I think the other waiters were like: Who is this lady? But everyone tolerated me,' Maley says. 'People open up when you take a real interest in them, their lives, what they want to do, what they have done, the thing they are passionate about, and ask them to explain it to you. People were really giving that way, even though it was a weird ask, and no one really knew what I was doing.' It wasn't quite Down and Out in Paris, but the experience gave Maley what she needed: a feel for the choreography, the repetition, the small tensions and quiet triumphs of restaurant life. What surprised her was how much it resembled a newsroom – fast-paced, hierarchical, and always one dropped order away from chaos. 'It's a structured environment, but it attracts people who are unstructured in other ways. It's a little like journalism and a newsroom in that way,' she says. 'Journalists are not people who want to work a 9 to 5 job, they're in for the experience and the adventure. We're solo operators, but we have to work within an organism, which is the newsroom. Newspapers are very hierarchical, even though we're all recalcitrant personalities who don't like being told what to do.' With classic recalcitrance, I break the fourth wall to ask our off-duty journalist if she's enjoying her turn in the Lunch With hot seat. 'Are you checking in?,' Maley jokes. 'It's going great for me, but am I giving you what you need?' A master of the form, I ask Maley for her Lunch With advice – she's got the recipe down, but I'm probably still chopping onions. 'Just get them really drunk,' she deadpans. 'It's quite high pressure, I think. It's like a social interaction on the surface, but your journalist brain is constantly working. ' A pause in proceedings: the main. Pappardelle with stracciatella and truss tomatoes so ripe they look ready to explode on impact. Maley unfolds a paper napkin and tucks it, bib-style, into the relaxed collar of her blue silk shirt. She catches my eye – the journalist's brain, even now, still quietly whirring. 'Can you not put this in the piece?' A pause, a sigh, a smile. 'No, you can, if you want.' The same brain – always scanning for angles and incoming alerts– makes it hard for Maley to write fiction while working her day job. Journalism brings a constant overload of information, paired with the nagging sense you're always missing something important. And while her reporting and novels both circle themes of gender and power, she doesn't see them as flexing the same muscle. Her ideal writing conditions are long, uninterrupted stretches away from work, not trying to wedge sentences between school drop-offs, play dates, early dog walks and breaking news alerts. Annual leave became writing leave – less a break than a change of deadlines. There was also the pressure of following up the success of her first novel and being contracted to a deadline as part of a two-book deal – a deadline she fell so far behind on that she can't even precisely remember when it was. 'I didn't take a holiday in years,' Maley says. 'So I ended up, at the end of it, realising it's quite hard to juggle all of this. It took a toll on me in terms of stress levels, and so that was something that I wouldn't want to do again. ' She's got ideas bubbling away – another novel, maybe a non-fiction project – but for now, she's letting them simmer. And at least restaurants are just restaurants again, no longer research sites in disguise. Loading 'I love cooking, I love gardening. I want to take my dog for a walk, I want to watch TV,' Maley says. 'When you're writing a book, every time you're home, it's always there. And now I'm like, I want to do non-intellectual pursuits for a while.' But first, we have a joint byline to get. As a friendly waitress delivers an unplanned – but not unwanted – tiramisu, we seize the opportunity to try to get a scoop. Did Taylor Swift enjoy a tiramisu when she dined here? The response, cool and non-committal: 'Taylor Swift, who's that? I couldn't possibly say.'
The Age
25-04-2025
- Health
- The Age
‘Miracle' weight-loss drugs shut down desire, but where's the fun in that?
This story is part of the April 26 edition of Good Weekend. See all 10 stories. I was about halfway through writing my new novel, Lonely Mouth, when first reports of the new drugs began trickling out – the magic new drugs that stopped hunger. As it happens, my book is about hunger, and eating, and food; about the inconvenient inability of human beings to switch off their desires. It is not every day the real world echoes you like this; responds to whatever it is you have been ruminating on for a while and throws up an answer to it. I had to pay attention, right? It was research. How else to explain the fact that, despite not being overweight, I read every single article I could find on this new generation of miracle weight-loss drugs? I now knew my Mounjaros from my Ozempics and my Wegovys from my Zepbounds. I loved the names of these new drugs – they sounded Olympian and titanic, able to leap buildings in a single bound. It seemed there was nothing they couldn't do. They turbocharged the entire economy of Denmark, where Novo Nordisk, the company that manufactures Ozempic, is based. Here was a drug that seemingly solved the problem of human desire. I ignored reports of side effects. I didn't want to know about gastro symptoms or depression. I just wanted to read about how these drugs transformed the lives of countless people who took them. Slimmed-down wives left husbands! Slimmed-down husbands left wives! People began to climb actual mountains and run actual marathons, after barely being able to lumber to the corner store in their pre-Ozempic bodies. Perhaps these drugs could solve the entire social and economic problem of obesity? They might put soft-drink companies and fast-food outlets out of business! Soon, there was news they might be helpful for people suffering from other compulsions – towards tobacco or alcohol, or other drugs of addiction. The drugs became so popular they were prescribed off-label; there were reports of shortages. Hardly surprising – here was a drug that seemingly solved the problem of human desire. Surely this was civilisation at its peak; scientific discovery meeting one of the most fundamental problems of the human condition. I became fascinated by first-person stories about the way these drugs were able to shut down desire within the brain, as though it is a tap that can be turned off. People reported that thoughts of food (or cigarettes or alcohol) just evaporated, almost overnight. They became indifferent to the thing they once craved. We think of desire as being something intrinsic to the human condition. But these drugs seemed to indicate that it was just a matter of brain chemistry. As I worked on my novel, which is the story of two half-sisters, 10 years apart in age and oceans apart in experience, I was thinking a lot about the nature of human hunger – for all things, not just food. I was in the mind of my main character, Matilda, who works in a smart restaurant in inner-city Sydney. I read everything I could on the running of kitchens. I spent hours mooning over cookbooks of all kinds. I interviewed chefs and I even did a few shifts waitressing to learn how service worked – the simple, noble act of putting meals in front of hungry people, every night. I marvelled at the organism of the kitchen, populated by humans, who are so prone to mistakes and emotions, and yet are so proficient in cooperation they can manage the nightly feat of cooking for and serving so many mouths all at once. I also ate out a lot, with great relish, in contrast to my main character. Matilda is dismayed by her own hungers but, not being able to deny them completely, instead seeks to control them and cordon them off. And Matilda is right to be dismayed by her own wants – they have caused her nothing but trouble. Matilda's younger sister, Lara, is very different. Lara feeds herself easily, literally and in other ways. She eats with the shamelessness and gusto of a healthy labrador. She lives her life in a similar way – guilelessly and artlessly, taking what she wants when she wants it. People without desires probably make good Buddhist monks, but they make dull companions. Despite making her living in the food industry, Matilda is covert and self-conscious with her hungers. Like many women, she vigilantly polices her own body, trying to keep it within acceptable bounds. Our bodies are the engines of our desires, but so many women view theirs with suspicion, disappointment or distaste. And in a world where many men continue to feel entitled to women's bodies, it is not surprising we try to govern them ourselves. Matilda doesn't like eating in front of others, and when she takes small personal pleasures for herself, like smoking weed or bingeing food, she does so in solitude. It's as though she lacks the sense of entitlement required to satiate herself in public, to take up space and resources for herself without apologising for it. Matilda would like to switch off her desires, à la Ozempic, but she finds herself incapable of that (which is to say, she is human). She is attracted to the Buddhist concept that suffering comes from attachment, from wanting things. I, too, like this idea and have read a bit about it. You are never so vulnerable as when you want something badly. Detachment is powerful. But here's the rub, the thing that the novelist in me knew: people without desires probably make good Buddhist monks, but they make dull companions and even worse characters. The best people are the ones with gusto, the ones with appetite, energy and vim. They don't ask for just a sliver of cake, or say they're watching their figure. They're the ones dragging their finger through the last puddle of sauce on the plate. Loading When we are reading fiction, what interests us are characters who wrestle with their desires. It is a custom of traditional fiction that every character must want something, and must be thwarted from getting it, at least for a while. It is the struggle we want to read about. We don't want to read about people who are content, for heaven's sake. Desire propels us forwards, towards the wanted thing. It keeps us going somewhere. And somewhere is better than nowhere, right? Of course, desire can also take us backwards – Marcel Proust wrote a notable book on this theme. In my case, writing my (far, far less notable) book sent me into a Proustian reverie about the meals I have had, and how I feel cross when I have a bad one because, just like days, we have a finite number of meals in our lives, and you can never get one back. I meditated on my grandmother's caramel sauce and the salmon blinis she served as the adults drank gin and tonic. I thought of my grandfather peeling the lemon, the fizz of the tonic water as he dropped it into the tumbler. I thought of the care and polish my grandmother put into everything she served us, high or low, be it frankfurts (proper ones from the deli, never supermarket hotdogs) in crusty French bread spread with good quality butter, or the summer pudding she made from scratch each Christmas. I thought of the apricot chicken and mashed potato under cling film that my mother left in the fridge for me, on one of the first nights I ever went out to the pub, aged 18. And I thought, and I still think, without all that, where is life's pleasure? And don't tell me that pleasure comes from not acquiring something or tasting it, but rather, that true happiness comes from appreciating things as they pass you by. Don't tell me that pleasure is in sunsets or your baby's smile. Because you might need to hike to watch your sunset, and for that, you will require a hearty sandwich and maybe a chocolate bar. And to feed that baby, you will need to feed yourself.
Sydney Morning Herald
25-04-2025
- Health
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘Miracle' weight-loss drugs shut down desire, but where's the fun in that?
This story is part of the April 26 edition of Good Weekend. See all 10 stories. I was about halfway through writing my new novel, Lonely Mouth, when first reports of the new drugs began trickling out – the magic new drugs that stopped hunger. As it happens, my book is about hunger, and eating, and food; about the inconvenient inability of human beings to switch off their desires. It is not every day the real world echoes you like this; responds to whatever it is you have been ruminating on for a while and throws up an answer to it. I had to pay attention, right? It was research. How else to explain the fact that, despite not being overweight, I read every single article I could find on this new generation of miracle weight-loss drugs? I now knew my Mounjaros from my Ozempics and my Wegovys from my Zepbounds. I loved the names of these new drugs – they sounded Olympian and titanic, able to leap buildings in a single bound. It seemed there was nothing they couldn't do. They turbocharged the entire economy of Denmark, where Novo Nordisk, the company that manufactures Ozempic, is based. Here was a drug that seemingly solved the problem of human desire. I ignored reports of side effects. I didn't want to know about gastro symptoms or depression. I just wanted to read about how these drugs transformed the lives of countless people who took them. Slimmed-down wives left husbands! Slimmed-down husbands left wives! People began to climb actual mountains and run actual marathons, after barely being able to lumber to the corner store in their pre-Ozempic bodies. Perhaps these drugs could solve the entire social and economic problem of obesity? They might put soft-drink companies and fast-food outlets out of business! Soon, there was news they might be helpful for people suffering from other compulsions – towards tobacco or alcohol, or other drugs of addiction. The drugs became so popular they were prescribed off-label; there were reports of shortages. Hardly surprising – here was a drug that seemingly solved the problem of human desire. Surely this was civilisation at its peak; scientific discovery meeting one of the most fundamental problems of the human condition. I became fascinated by first-person stories about the way these drugs were able to shut down desire within the brain, as though it is a tap that can be turned off. People reported that thoughts of food (or cigarettes or alcohol) just evaporated, almost overnight. They became indifferent to the thing they once craved. We think of desire as being something intrinsic to the human condition. But these drugs seemed to indicate that it was just a matter of brain chemistry. As I worked on my novel, which is the story of two half-sisters, 10 years apart in age and oceans apart in experience, I was thinking a lot about the nature of human hunger – for all things, not just food. I was in the mind of my main character, Matilda, who works in a smart restaurant in inner-city Sydney. I read everything I could on the running of kitchens. I spent hours mooning over cookbooks of all kinds. I interviewed chefs and I even did a few shifts waitressing to learn how service worked – the simple, noble act of putting meals in front of hungry people, every night. I marvelled at the organism of the kitchen, populated by humans, who are so prone to mistakes and emotions, and yet are so proficient in cooperation they can manage the nightly feat of cooking for and serving so many mouths all at once. I also ate out a lot, with great relish, in contrast to my main character. Matilda is dismayed by her own hungers but, not being able to deny them completely, instead seeks to control them and cordon them off. And Matilda is right to be dismayed by her own wants – they have caused her nothing but trouble. Matilda's younger sister, Lara, is very different. Lara feeds herself easily, literally and in other ways. She eats with the shamelessness and gusto of a healthy labrador. She lives her life in a similar way – guilelessly and artlessly, taking what she wants when she wants it. People without desires probably make good Buddhist monks, but they make dull companions. Despite making her living in the food industry, Matilda is covert and self-conscious with her hungers. Like many women, she vigilantly polices her own body, trying to keep it within acceptable bounds. Our bodies are the engines of our desires, but so many women view theirs with suspicion, disappointment or distaste. And in a world where many men continue to feel entitled to women's bodies, it is not surprising we try to govern them ourselves. Matilda doesn't like eating in front of others, and when she takes small personal pleasures for herself, like smoking weed or bingeing food, she does so in solitude. It's as though she lacks the sense of entitlement required to satiate herself in public, to take up space and resources for herself without apologising for it. Matilda would like to switch off her desires, à la Ozempic, but she finds herself incapable of that (which is to say, she is human). She is attracted to the Buddhist concept that suffering comes from attachment, from wanting things. I, too, like this idea and have read a bit about it. You are never so vulnerable as when you want something badly. Detachment is powerful. But here's the rub, the thing that the novelist in me knew: people without desires probably make good Buddhist monks, but they make dull companions and even worse characters. The best people are the ones with gusto, the ones with appetite, energy and vim. They don't ask for just a sliver of cake, or say they're watching their figure. They're the ones dragging their finger through the last puddle of sauce on the plate. Loading When we are reading fiction, what interests us are characters who wrestle with their desires. It is a custom of traditional fiction that every character must want something, and must be thwarted from getting it, at least for a while. It is the struggle we want to read about. We don't want to read about people who are content, for heaven's sake. Desire propels us forwards, towards the wanted thing. It keeps us going somewhere. And somewhere is better than nowhere, right? Of course, desire can also take us backwards – Marcel Proust wrote a notable book on this theme. In my case, writing my (far, far less notable) book sent me into a Proustian reverie about the meals I have had, and how I feel cross when I have a bad one because, just like days, we have a finite number of meals in our lives, and you can never get one back. I meditated on my grandmother's caramel sauce and the salmon blinis she served as the adults drank gin and tonic. I thought of my grandfather peeling the lemon, the fizz of the tonic water as he dropped it into the tumbler. I thought of the care and polish my grandmother put into everything she served us, high or low, be it frankfurts (proper ones from the deli, never supermarket hotdogs) in crusty French bread spread with good quality butter, or the summer pudding she made from scratch each Christmas. I thought of the apricot chicken and mashed potato under cling film that my mother left in the fridge for me, on one of the first nights I ever went out to the pub, aged 18. And I thought, and I still think, without all that, where is life's pleasure? And don't tell me that pleasure comes from not acquiring something or tasting it, but rather, that true happiness comes from appreciating things as they pass you by. Don't tell me that pleasure is in sunsets or your baby's smile. Because you might need to hike to watch your sunset, and for that, you will require a hearty sandwich and maybe a chocolate bar. And to feed that baby, you will need to feed yourself.
