Every Coming-of-Age Story Is a Story About Hunger

Hannah Kingsley-Ma interviews Sanaë Lemoine, author of ‘The Margot Affair,’ on cooking, recipe development, and using food to build plot and character.

One of my favorite books of last year was Sanaë Lemoine’s debut novel, The Margot Affair. Margot, a seventeen-year-old Parisian bursting with private knowledge, is the story’s protagonist. She herself is a secret: Her father is a prominent politician who had an affair with her auteur actress mother. He lives with his wife and other children, concealing his second family from the public’s view. Margot engineers a world where that’s no longer the case, but with it comes a series of events that quickly spiral out of her control.

This is a novel where things happen—where families both cohere and collide—but it somehow avoids any forced feelings of drama or sentiment. It’s told with a measured hand and a careful eye for detail. I found myself particularly admiring the way food is employed, each meal elegantly mapping the different ways in which these characters relate to one another.

It did not surprise me to learn that Sanaë has worked in a professional capacity as a cookbook editor and recipe developer and currently is at work on coauthoring her own cookbook. She even created a set of recipes based off of dishes in her novel. I wanted to know how all of this work feeds into her fiction writing, and how all of us writers can harness the specificity of certain meals to make a scene. We spoke about poison cream puffs, the piecemeal labor of both building a novel and a recipe, cannibalism, and spying on others in the kitchen.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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Hannah Kingsley-Ma: The way appetite functions in this book is so interesting to me. I feel like it runs up against the sort of glossy food-media idea that food is always an extension of care, always an uncomplicated expression of sharing and generosity. I love seeing the different relationships in this book refracted through the lens of what they eat together.

Sanaë Lemoine: I was thinking about how different the fiction world of writing about food is from the food media/cookbook world. Or at least for me, those feel like very separate spaces, though of course they leak into one another, and I’m still figuring out what the relationship is between the two.

In my food-writing work, either as recipe editor or writer or a cookbook editor, I have to channel a very specific voice—Martha Stewart’s voice or an editorial voice. And I’m thinking about a headnote in very practical terms, like how can I describe this food and make it sound delicious without saying that it’s delicious. I’m never gonna be grotesque or strange. I’m thinking about this one way of talking about food, whereas in every other experience that I have around food, it’s kind of the opposite. Sometimes the thing that is appetizing or most exciting or beautiful about a dish is not how delicious it is. It might be in the tension between different things within the meal.

HKM: I imagine it to be fastidious work, the recipe testing and the developing of the recipes. How do you work on your own fiction writing? Does your food-media work lend itself to it, or does it feel good in just how different it is?

SL: I’m still figuring it out. Up until the middle of 2019, I had full-time jobs in food. I would work as a cookbook editor the entire week and often that work spilled over. But then I would have hours either very early in the morning or on the weekends when I would write fiction.

When I’m cooking, I’m never thinking about writing, and it’s kind of terrifying and thrilling that I can turn off my writing brain in that way. When I’m walking or showering, I’m thinking about my novel and the characters. But as soon as I start cooking, whether it’s following a recipe, developing a recipe, or making a really simple meal for lunch, that part of my brain turns off or empties out and I’m completely focused on the physicality of what I’m doing.

The hardest part is just that they both take a lot of time. I’m a slow writer, and dreaming up the world of a novel and getting to know the characters—and even just writing an entire book—takes quite a bit of time for me. There’s a similarity in fiction writing and recipe writing in the sense that you could endlessly tweak both.

With The Margot Affair, I wasn’t thinking that much about the way that food operates in the novel. I know it’s a big part of the novel, in part because food is such a big part of me and how I experience every day—so it would make sense that there would be characters thinking about food and cooking and sharing meals. But with my second novel, I’m thinking more about the food scenes, being more intentional about them and what they’re doing—without taking the magic away from the creative process but noticing the ways that I use food, whether it’s the preparation of a meal or eating a meal, and how that can move a story along and teach us things about the characters.

When I’m cooking, I’m never thinking about writing.

HKM: There does seem, to me, a parallel between the incremental work of developing a recipe and the incremental work of building a novel. I was really surprised to read that you had said in an interview that plot doesn’t come naturally to you. I think one of the great pleasures of this book is that there is a lot of consequence in it, which I was thrilled by, and which is something that I struggle with in my own writing. And so I’m wondering: When you write a scene where someone is sharing a meal, is that a way of opening up a scene and creating those moments of progression that help you move through the story?

SL: The way that I write is very much scene to scene without knowing what the ending is or what the big moments are necessarily. But I know what the next scene is. Maybe it’s a meal, maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s an event, maybe it’s sex. With The Margot Affair, it took many drafts to get to the stage where I could start identifying what the important moments in the novel are, like those moments of tension where we’re on the threshold of something, or the precipice of something—and what’s the cause and effect and consequence as well.

Something a writer friend said recently that really resonated with me around food scenes is how so much of plot or movement comes from conversations between characters. I think that’s true for my novel, where you’ll have maybe two characters in a scene and they’re having some kind of conversation. Even a sex scene is a conversation at first. And often we have conversations over food; that is one of the easiest ways to set up dialogue between two characters or several characters. A food scene can be such a dramatic moment as a result. I love to give my character something to do while they’re talking, so either they’re cooking, they’re preparing a meal, or one character is watching another character cook. I personally love to watch people cook, and I’m always observing the smallest little details in a creepy way and like, asking them: “What if you had to invite someone over, what would you make for them? What’s your signature dish and how would you prepare it?”

It’s so fun to watch someone else cook. You learn so much about who they are, even their personality and their way of moving their body. And so I love to have a scene like that in my writing; it’s very visceral. If you’re not feeling well, then that’s gonna have an impact on how you’re eating your food. You might lose your appetite for a moment, or something might not taste as good, or you might suddenly realize that you’re hungry because you’re feeling attracted to the person across from you. And that arousal transfers to the food that you’re eating. It can go in so many different directions, but I love that it’s an opportunity to connect with the physicality of the characters and also have that transference to the reader—because everyone has eaten food or prepared food, even if it’s the most basic meal.

I love how you can imbue a food scene or a scene where there are food details with so much emotion without it feeling sentimental. I love writing that doesn’t shy away from emotion; I can’t do the ironic distance. But I also worry about my writing sometimes being too sentimental. How do you communicate care and love and tenderness without using those words? A great way to do that is through food, or that’s how I kind of found a way around it.

I didn’t want food to just be maternal nourishment, though I think often it is that. And we all think about the dishes that our mothers have cooked for us. My mother is a really wonderful cook and spent too much time cooking for us when I was growing up. But that wasn’t the book I wanted to write. I wanted it to be a little bit dangerous.

HKM: My big aha moment the second time around was like, wow, forgot how much cannibalism is in this!

SL: I saw this movie a couple of years ago, when I was already deep in writing The Margot Affair. It’s a French movie, but in English it’s called Raw. It’s a coming-of-age film about a young woman. She’s probably eighteen or so. She’s studying to be a vet and discovers that she loves to eat human flesh. One of the things I loved so much about this movie is the way that it intertwines appetite and hunger and a coming-of-age story.

I remember as a kid being being so surprised that adults never seemed hungry. They wouldn’t talk about how hungry they were for a meal. Maybe they just wouldn’t do it around us, I thought. We were always starving for everything, but especially as adolescents.

HKM: Are there fiction writers who you think write food really well?

SL: Crystal Hana Kim writes really amazingly about food in her first novel. She really has a talent for bringing a scene to life through food. And I really loved the way Gabriella Burnham incorporated food in her novel It Is Wood, It Is Stone. We’ve become friends, and now that I’ve gotten to know her, I’ve learned that she’s a really great cook and has an appreciation for food. It makes sense that she thinks about whether her characters are eating or not.

I think that’s something I notice a lot in books, whether the author is at all preoccupied with whether the characters are eating—not that we need to know every single meal that someone is eating or a character is eating. Even though it’s not the focus, it’s something that I always appreciate. It’s like, well, the characters are not living off of thin air. I know they’re nourishing themselves in some way.

HKM: I totally agree. I think it really grounds the scene.

SL: There is this amazing novella by Yoko Ogawa called The Diving Pool. There’s a rotten cream puff that I often think about. It’s so brilliant. The protagonist waits for the cream puff to rot and then she feeds it to a baby and the baby gets sick. It’s one of the few instances where food really is poison—something that was delicious turns into something that could really harm another person. And then it’s used as a weapon.

HKM: How did you decide to write the recipes on your website that were in the book?

SL: I was trying to think of ways to help promote the book and the pandemic had started and things were looking really bleak. I was trying to think of ways that readers could connect with the book. It was actually a very interesting exercise because I went back to the paragraphs and I was like, I really want this recipe to match what I wrote. The way that I wrote it in the book wasn’t the way that I would make it in my kitchen. And so it seemed counterintuitive to work backward in that way, to turn something that was completely theoretical and fictional into something concrete—it almost didn’t quite fit.

HKM: What do you think was different about reverse engineering these recipes from how the characters in the novel prepared them and writing these recipes out as you would have cooked them in real life?

SL: I think I was just being freer. It’s similar to how we write dialogue, which isn’t exactly how it happens in real life. There’s definitely an element of crafting and of artifice that happens with food where I’m not trying for this meal to be accurate, in the sense that it’s not how I would write the recipe, but I want it to feel true to the characters and to the readers.