Exposure therapy
Announcing books, promoting books, and an emergency Beigel Bake
You may have seen that I announced my new book a fortnight ago. It is called Picky, it is about my life and the forming of identity through food, and it is going to be published in hardback, by Hodder & Stoughton, on 29 May 2025. The cover features a picture of me at the age of about nine or ten – cut-out from a larger family photo featuring other smiling relatives and, indelibly, my eldest brother flipping a middle finger at the camera for no discernible reason – grinning as I wait for food to be spooned onto my dinner plate. It’s an image of innocent, hungry expectation (not to mention mesmerising, 1990s patterned shirts that look like they could double as Magic Eye posters). And so, I suppose, there is a kind of symmetry to the fact that my main memory of the moments before its grand unveiling involve a kind of mad, all-consuming ravenousness.
I had been working at a space on the shoulder of Brick Lane; a draughty, enjoyably unpeopled converted church where I had spent so long tweaking my announcement post on Instagram, attending to other tasks, and absentmindedly watching YouTube videos about Fantasy Premier League strategy that, by 3pm, I still hadn’t had lunch. Cue a stroll past the vinegary fug of Poppies fish and chips, and up to the window of St John Bread & Wine. Cue an aimless, Goldilocks meander down towards Noodle & Beer, Spitalfields Market, and a shuttered branch of Planet Organic that had seemingly closed so suddenly I doubted whether it was ever there. Cue that weird doom loop of decision paralysis that tends to occur when I am so hungry that a consequenceless, basic dining choice feel impossibly fraught and high stakes.
In the end I hooked back towards Beigel Bake and returned to my little hotdesk gripping a laden brown paper bag, spotted here and there by the brine of a pickle spear. When I remember this big, professional ‘ta-dah’ moment, I will think of myself looking down at a phone screen, pushing a familiarly indecorous fist of bread, salt beef and mustard into my gob. There was another kind of familiarity too. Looking at the mounting likes and the excited, lovely comments on Instagram – feeling real relief and gratitude but, also, anxiety and that slightly grubby need for another smacky hit of approval and engagement in the form of a tiny little heart icon – I registered a recognisable shift. My first experience of publishing a book was that I wasn’t really alive to the fact that I would have to both create the thing and sell it too. True, there is support from publicity and marketing teams (support that can vary wildly, I should say – though I have only ever experienced the brilliant version) but I just wasn’t at all prepared for the hard, whiplashing pivot that even moderately ambitious authors had to perform from the private, hunched toil of the writer, to the public, jazz-handsing presentation and articulacy of the self-promoter.
This was the perceptible transition that I felt alongside those (still completely peerless) bites of chewy bagel and ribboned shreds of cured meat. The transfer of anxieties about themes, phrasing, pace of prose to anxieties about sales charts, event bookings and shrugging, public ambivalence. Yes, you have devised and rehearsed the show, booked the venue, rigged the lights and set up the sound system but, sad to say mate, you’re also going to have to go outside and press some of these flyers into people’s hands. It is an unavoidable reality to be embraced rather than dreaded. Nonetheless, it can feel more than a little dizzying.
So, to extend the metaphor, what sort of a show am I eagerly trying to get you to take a chance on? As I noted in my announcement post on Instagram, one of the things that I was aware of with my first book, a social history of Black African British culture called Settlers, was that it wasn’t the exclusively food-focused book lots of people were anticipating. This was very much by design. My intention with Settlers was to zag slightly from what was expected and apply my 20 years of varied journalistic experience to a personal subject that only partly encompassed cuisine.
But the plan was always to write a book that was predominantly about food, culture, identity and the complicated, unlikely eating trajectory that probably underpins my approach as a restaurant critic. To bring the introductory debut album out after the experimental second one. Picky, then, is me applying all the things that are hopefully a recognisable hallmark of my restaurant writing – thoughtfulness, humour, curiosity and descriptive vigour – to my own story. Haunting school dinners and the significance of Ikea hot dogs. Northern Nigerian barbecue and culinary misadventure in rural France. Parental abandonment, gluey nubbins of cheese on burger wrappers, and the glare of the MasterChef critics chamber. All that and more is in there. It has been the most challenging thing I have ever done but it also, I think, features my best written work ever. That said, it is also honest in a way that does not feel all that natural. And so any sense of creative achievement is somewhat shadowed by the fear that theres’ some calamitous error of judgement I won’t know about until the big reveal; a gaping, surprise crotch-hole on the meticulously constructed outfit that I have spent months sewing and embroidering in secret.
Naturally, one consequence of scrambling to finish the book over the last six months or so is that it was very much a spanner flung into the works of my plans for Seconds. I kept thinking that I could somehow find a way to write reviews while meeting existing work deadlines, and also completing work on an emotionally, psychologically and physically draining 90,000 word book (here we must pour out some tap water and a shared order of radishes for the Yellow Bittern reservation I had to cancel in November) but it sadly proved beyond me. I’ve basically emerged from that work tunnel now so my hope is that posts will be more frequent. Long-stewing reviews. Themed recommendations lists. A peek behind the curtain on the process of writing Picky. What I’m pretty sure is currently London’s most enjoyable burger. All are in my plans. All will, hopefully, appear with some regularity over the next few months.
Fundamentally, the other side of my eagerness to make Picky a success – and not to get too Timothée Chalamet meme about it, but I really do want it to be one – is that I’m incredibly proud of it. That was the overriding feeling, just last week, when I was going through final proofs, and occasionally agonising about word repetition, moments of potentially embarrassing disclosure, or whether each pseudonymised name was far enough away from its real-life equivalent. The other lesson of Settlers’ publication was that lots of the metrics by which a book will be judged are outside of my control. All I can do is measure the finished project against what I wanted to do, or say. I did the thing. Gave it all I had and more, and now just hope it connects. Everything else is just added sprinkles on a lavishly iced and cherried cake.
I look at that smiling picture of myself on Picky’s front cover and feel a strange flutter of excited, vertiginous nervousness about all that may yet come. But I also think that the boy holding the plate would not be concerning himself with event venue capacity, reviews or sales trajectory. He would be thrilled and amazed that he had written a book about his life that people would soon be able to buy in shops. I only want to make that daft, vegetable-avoidant kid happy and proud. Whatever else comes down the line, I feel that I’ve already done that.
Thanks for sticking around and welcome if you’ve recently joined. I truly appreciate it and am looking forward to building momentum and just sharing a bit more about my process (sorry, impossible to not laugh when that ‘process’ is very much just one man either clanking a grimy Brompton into a small plates place or drinking coffee while tapping at a malfunctioning MacBook) and upcoming bits. Big love. And, as ever, much more soon.
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