Food for Thought was my first novel, and if you’d asked me two months before I started writing it, I would have told you definitively that I did not have a novel in me. I’d written a self-help book, and wrote almost exclusively non-fiction, and only allowed myself to read fiction when I was on a sun lounger.
Fast forward to lock-down, where the self-help went out the window and I found myself eating gluten and drinking rosé (shock horror!). We had a gorgeous spring in the UK, and I would walk by the River Thames with my puppy, revelling in the abundance of cow parsley and forget-me-nots on the tow-path, trying very hard to imagine I wasn’t in London. My in-laws live in rural Kent (about twenty miles south of London as the crow flies) and May was my favourite month down there. I couldn’t believe we were missing nature’s party at my favourite time of year.
Because of all the panic buying, it was difficult to buy exciting fresh food, and I started to dream about a parallel universe, where a city creature escaped down to Kent and gorged herself on food and drink and learnt how to be kinder to herself. What possible crisis could propel her down there, I wondered?
At the beginning, Food for Thought wasn’t a romance. It was about a woman trying to understand what she wants from life; what’s important. I even wondered if her rift with her husband would be temporary. And then I dreamed up Angus. Dot, dot, dot, as Sophie from Mamma Mia would say. I knew I wanted her to find new love. And so I needed a rift in her marriage that would be clearly irreparable. A gay husband is a pretty safe deal-breaker.
In the UK, a famous TV presenter, Philip Schofield, came out as gay on his morning TV show after twenty-seven years of marriage. I wondered how on earth his wife had dealt with that blow, whether she had always secretly suspected, just how honest he’d been with her. And so my inciting incident was born, and I made the whole episode as excruciating and shambolic as possible. It was a lot of fun! And without giving away any spoilers, Evelyn does get her big, fat, happy ending with a bow on it (it turns out I have a weakness for big, fat happy endings. All my books have them).
Writing Food for Thought was a transformative process for me at a time when nothing in the world felt certain. I fell very, very hard for Angus, my first book boyfriend, and I adored the world I’d created at Sorrel Farm so much that I realised I needed to write more books set in that special place. Food for Thought now has two sequels which are also standalone novels: Heaven on Earth and When Then Becomes Now.
I hope you enjoy Food for Thought, and I hope reading it provides you with the respite that writing it did for me!