The Burnt Toast Podcast "I've Been Writing Food Porn for a Year."
Today Virginia is chatting with Jo Piazza, best selling author, journalist, and podcast creator. You might know her from her awesome podcast Under the Influence, or her very excellent Substack Over the Influence. And her new book, co-authored with Christine Pride entitled You Were Always Mine, just came out this month.
Remember, if you order Jo's book (or any books we mention on the pod!) from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, you can get 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)
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Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.
BUTTER & OTHER LINKS
Jo's other books:
Other book recs:
Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake
Big Girl by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert
Our Little Kitchen by Jillian Tamaki
Starfish by Lisa Fipps
Bodies Are Cool and Dancing at the Pity Party by Tyler Feder
Misc & Butter
what do I do with my best friend who’s dieting and I’m sick of hearing about it?
Navigating Chick-fil-A
“Those who don’t cook don’t get to complain.”
The Whispers by Ashley Audrain
ice cream bowls from East Fork
style section cover story about East Fork
FAT TALK is out! Order your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. You can also order the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.
CREDITS
The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter. Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe. Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell. Tommy Harron is our audio engineer. Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
Episode 98
Jo
I keep telling everyone, I’m warning them in my interviews, that I didn’t realize until right now that all of our books—the titles use a lot of pronouns.
The first one is We Are Not Like Them and this one is You Were Always Mine. The one that we’re writing right now is I Never Knew You At All. So I’m really fucking it up in these interviews because I’m like, You Were Never Ours. What?
This one is You Were Always Mine.
Virginia
You Were Always Mine, a book about pronouns?
Well, I think it’s just a wonderful, wonderful book. I could not put it down. I’ve been doing a lot of heavy nonfiction reading and it was just so what I needed after burnout on other kinds of reading. I just spent the last four days with you both and it was delightful.
Jo
Thank you, I really appreciate it. That’s what we wanted. There’s a lot of heavy shit in the world right now and this book brings up things to think about, but we also wanted to give people a soft place to land for a little while.
Virginia
I’m a little bit of a fragile flower and I can’t do trauma porn at all, but I like books with substance and that deal with issues. I want there to be a name for this type of book because this is what I’m always looking for! Where it’s about real issues and real people and complicated stuff, but I’m not traumatized reading it. I’m crying in like a cathartic positive way.
Jo
Yes, and not in an I-want-to-lock-myself-in-the-dark-and-not-come-out way.
Virginia
Not in an I’m-now-going-to-have-intrusive-thoughts way.
Jo
Which is a different cry.
Virginia
It just is.
So, the book is out. We’re very excited about it. Everyone needs to go get it. But what we’re actually going to talk about today is the importance of seeing women enjoy food in fiction.
Jo
I think about it so much. I’m starting to dive into fiction with my daughter, right? She’s three and a half but this is where you start to read chapter books to them. This is where you start to parse out what kinds of things do I want in my daughter’s head? What kinds of things have been in my head for the past 30 years?
And I was a big fan of the standard 90’s chick lit. Bridget Jones, Emily Giffin’s books, all the Jane Greens, loved them. And I feel like for so long in commercial women’s fiction, when they talked about food at all, if they talked about food at all, it was in a very restrictive way. Bridget Jones is the worst offender and it’s one of my favorite books.
Virginia
The calorie count of a banana, I will never not know that. I didn’t know it before I read the book.
Jo
Right? And now you will always know it. We tried to satirize that in my novel Fitness Junkie, to just send up how ridiculous this world can be. It’s a shift to simply normalizing women loving food as much as we love food and as much as I adore french fries and potato chips and steaks. I don’t want to think in terms of diets and calories and seeing that on the page. In You Were Always Mine it was it was important to us that Cinnamon just love eating, without hitting the reader over the head being like “she loves it.”
Virginia
It’s not an annoying trope.
Jo
It’s just like, you’ve got some like shrimp sizzling in butter on the stove and eat it and then have sex. Amazing! All of the pleasures for you. You deserve all of that. That was really important to both Christine and I.
My next book is set in Sicily and my main character for that is a butcher. She owns a steak restaurant. I’ve been writing food porn for the past year and now all I want to do is read more books where women are enjoying eating.
Virginia
I mean, it would be a crime to set a book in Sicily and not have food porn.
In You Were Always Mine the food stuff is not the main focus of the book at all. It’s this nice detail of her character that you get to see her enjoying food. I don’t think it gives away too much to say she had a hard childhood, food scarcity is something she’d experienced. So there’s some nuance to her food story, too. It’s not just loving it for the sake of loving it. You really invest in her loving.
Jo
You have this and you can really enjoy it. Christine and I, we’re two women who love food and love eating. We’ve celebrated every one of our book milestones at a delicious, amazing restaurant. It’s funny because when we found out that our last book was a Good Morning America book club pick—they tell you six months in advance and then they’re like, and by the way, it’s a secret.
Virginia
Oh, I wouldn’t do well with that.
Jo
Well, we didn’t. We totally failed. We immediately left Christine’s apartment in Harlem and went out to one of our favorite pizza places, ate all the pizza and drink all the tequila and told Tiffany, the bartender, that we were a Good Morning America book club pick.
Virginia
I feel like Tiffany could keep a lid on it, though.
Jo
I don’t think she told anyone.
Virginia
She was probably like, “that’s great.”
Jo
She’s like, “I don’t even know what you mean. But here’s some more parmesan fries.”
We get our best writing done while we’re eating meals together. I think that that is because our books do have to deal with hard conversations sometimes. We talk about race and we talk about friendship and class and those things. I think the best conversations happen over meals, when you sit down and you share food and you can just be open and free and give each other grace. And so most of our books have been written over meals and meals that then end up in our books.
Virginia
So you’re literally sitting there with your laptops and your food.
Jo
Laptops open and french fries and burgers. This is why we keep writing books together, because it’s really fun.
Virginia
It’s delicious.
That’s a great writing process. There’s often writing that I need to do with a snack—I’m big on the chocolate chips at the desk, that’s a real power through when I’m trying to get many thousands of words done quickly kind of thing. But now I’m like, oh, I have been not putting enough thought into this.
Jo
I also write a lot, when I’m writing solo, in restaurants. I’m in Philly and Philadelphia is just such a good restaurant city. But After COVID when I was locked up for so long, there’s so many restaurants that I missed. So I take myself out to lunch a couple of times a week, and I’ll try a new restaurant from the best of Philly list and just take my laptop. That’s an hour and a half where I’m enjoying a new meal and I’m writing and it’s so much nicer than just sitting at a desk. It’s awesome.
Virginia
Well, that’s incredible. That’s leveling up the coffee shop writing experience, which I was never very good at. I get distracted and the chairs aren’t comfortable. And the stress of holding your table. But in a restaurant, you can get up and go to the bathroom and not worry that people are going to steal your stuff without having to negotiate with someone.
Jo
Exactly. My entire literary life and the past two years has been very infused with delicious food.
Virginia
Another irritating trope that comes up in fiction with women and food where they are eating to delight a man. Gilmore Girls is an example I’m thinking of, which is not a novel. But the way that Gilmore Girls eat and men marveling at it, which is really irritating to me. And like marveling that “you’re thin and you can eat this way,” and all of that.
There was like a little of that where like her husband comments on her eating, but doesn’t really understand it because it’s got this whole backstory. So I loved how you played with that trope there. I thought that was really smart.
The other thing that I loved was the way she eats with her best friend. There’s a great scene of her and Lucia sharing the popcorn watching a movie. Food as this tool of bonding between women is really cool.
Jo
One of my favorite things is the picture of Lucia on Cinnamon’s phone is a picture of her eating peanut butter out of a jar at 3 in the morning.
Virginia
Such a good detail.
Jo
They bonded because they both eat peanut butter out of a jar at 3 in the morning. So that’s the picture on each other’s phones. And I’m like, yes, that is me. That was my friend and I, we bond over those little, tiny things.
Virginia
There’s a lot of stereotypes about women being very diet-y together and going to the restaurant and only ordering salads and “are you going to get dessert? I don’t know if I’m going to get dessert.” And all of that. And what a delight not to have that.
Jo
Which I had in some of my past books, too. I know that I did, like looking back at them. And I don’t know if it was a case of just imitating what I had seen, imitating what I see thrown at us in culture generally or what I thought that I should be writing. I just don’t think I was nearly aware enough of it until I had my daughters. And it’s one of those things like, Oh, I’m nearsighted and I put on glasses and now I see something. Now I do see it and I’m glad that I can see it. I think so many things about how we write about women need to change generally. But that is one of the things that I don’t think gets talked about enough.
Virginia
It’s a fine line, too, because a lot of times women’s friendships have this diet component. This is a common question I get asked, like, what do I do with my best friend who’s dieting and I’m sick of hearing about it? So it makes sense to incorporate some of that.
I was also interested in the character of Daisy, who is the other protagonist of the book, and who’s in a bigger body. There’s some discussion of her weight loss attempts. For listeners: I want to be clear that it’s not pro “Daisy needs to lose weight,” there’s no weight loss narrative arc, but there are references to that being part of her past.
I was curious if you want to talk a little bit about how you thought about Daisy in all of this.
Jo
Daisy in our book, she is in a bit of a bigger body. Daisy has a pregnancy that no one around her notices, so really one of the only ways to get around that was to have her start out in a bigger body, and as a person who usually wears bigger clothes. But Christine and I wanted to be as sensitive as possible when we were writing Daisy. Because I struggle with my weight. Like, I can go up and down four or five sizes over the course of a year. Struggle is the wrong word, but I fluctuate. So we didn’t want Daisy to be a caricature. I never wanted anyone to look at any pictures of Christine or me and be like, how dare they write Daisy? And we never want Daisy to be fixated on diet culture.
We want to Daisy to feel strong. Daisy wants to be a pilot. She’s been told for so long that’s something that’s ridiculous. Like, how will you sit in the front of a plane? And we wanted to break down that stereotype, too. But then Cinnamon and Daisy bond over eating french fries. And Cinnamon is like, “Oh, I saw her working out? What should I do? Like should I not offer her French fries? Screw it, I’m buying her French fries. She loves french fries. We’re gonna eat our french fries together.”
Virginia
I thought it was very thoughtfully done. I admit, I had a moment of like, is this two straight-size authors writing about a fat person? There was that travesty of The Whale. And I want to be real clear, this is not in that category at all. She’s a very nuanced character and her weight is not the barrier to what she wants in her life. She’s not sad, not pathetic. She’s super complicated.
Jo
Her life is hard, but it has nothing to do with her weight. That’s the thing. And I’m happy for Daisy at the end of the book. I am happy with where she ends up.
Virginia
Agreed.
Jo
That’s another conversation I think that authors need to be having more of, like how are we sensitive as we write characters and what characters should we be more sensitive as we’re writing? I don’t think that there’s enough talk about when we’re writing about size and bodies, especially when it comes to women.
Virginia
I think there’s a few folks doing it well. I think Jasmine Guillory’s books have done a lot to center protagonists and great food scenes. But who else do you think is doing it well?
Jo
I was going to say Jasmine. Because still not nearly enough authors, I could not tell you that I read something recently where I was like, “oh, yeah, they nailed it.”
I’m constantly looking for more and I don’t see enough. Who else are you seeing?
Virginia
Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake was one that was a great food book. The protagonist is straight size—they don’t really talk about her body at all—but it’s sort of styled on The Great British Bake Off.
Jo
I haven’t even heard of this.
Virginia
, who works on the newsletter with me, told me to read it. And she was right.
There are great food scenes because they’re making these elaborate cakes all the time.
A book I really loved for body stuff was Big Girl by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, which is about a teenager growing up in Harlem, a Black girl who is fat. I mean, it’s a tough read, because her mom is very directly and abusively putting weight loss on her a lot of the time. But it’s ultimately incredibly empowering. And there are a lot of really interesting discussions of what her size means for her moving through the neighborhood, how she’s perceived by other Black people, how she’s perceived by white people. It’s just one of those books you can’t stop thinking about.
Jo
I think Jen Weiner’s evolution in writing about size. Because she always has—I’ve been a fan of Jen forever, since her first books. She lives not far from me, so I actually get to see her in person and talk to her and have her be a person who lives in my world, which is wonderful.
But In the beginning, she had characters of all sizes, but there was still the focus on dieting and being so uncomfortable with their bodies. And now, in her more recent books all sizes are so much more normalized. It’s not an issue. But that’s definitely an evolution and it’s one that you notice if you read through her whole amazing canon of books.
Virginia
Yeah and food is always pretty great in a Jen Weiner novel.
Jo
Food has always been great in a Jen Weiner novel.
I interviewed her probably 20 years ago, when I was a baby at the New York Daily News back when newspapers still had books sections. I remember Jen saying that she wanted to write more about women enjoying their food. And that always stuck with me.
Virginia
Another one I really love is Talia Hibbert. Have you read her novels? She’s a British writer with a trio of novels about the Brown sisters. Get a Life, Chloe Brown.
Jo
Yes, I have a copy of Get a Life, Chloe Brown in one of my many TBR piles.
Virginia
It’s so fun. You will read it in an afternoon. It’s like really good sex, really good food, and a fat, Black protagonist. My friend Heidi who owns our local independent bookstore in my town and my friend Mary—shout out to Heidi and Mary—we are starting a feminist romance book club.
Jo
Shut your mouth!
Virginia
Yeah, it’s pretty good. Mary and I are also in a Hot Tub Book Club with our friends, where we just sit in people’s hot tubs and talk about whatever book. That’s also great.
Jo
How many friends do you have with hot tubs?
Virginia
Only two of us. I think we realized there were two hot tubs in our social group and then quickly arranged a book club around can we sit in these hot tubs?
Jo
Where do you live again? And can I get to the hot tubs at some point?
Virginia
You are invited anytime! We’re in the Hudson Valley.
Jo
Oh shut your mouth, I’m in the Catskills half the time! I’m going to come down and get in the hot tub. We could do a whole podcast episode from the hot tub.
I love these two book clubs for you.
Virginia
My book club life is very rich right now. But what I was going to say is so for feminist romance we are always like: What is the next Talia Hibbert? Because I feel like she is the queen of the genre. She and Jasmine Guillory, it’s a tie.
We’ve tried some where we’re like, “this is gonna be it,” and then it’s another skinny blonde chick getting the guy. And okay, it was a fun read, but you didn’t advance us at all. And not enough food!
Jo
Not enough food.
So both Christine and I have solo projects that we’re working on right now.
Virginia
How are you writing so many books at once?
Jo
I’m very fast. You know, I’m never going to be Hemingway, even though he’s overrated, but I’m very fast because I was a newspaper reporter for so long. As a tabloid newspaper reporter, if you didn’t deliver your copy at 5pm, a drunk Australian editor-in-chief was like throwing a coffee mug at your head, back in the early 2000s.
So I mean, I’m broken. I’m just broken and trained to write fast.
But, Christine’s new novel is going to be a feminist romance. You can’t read it for two years, but I’ve already read it. It’s loosely based on her own love story about how she reconnected with her first boyfriend from New York City who she dated 27 years ago. And they reconnected two years ago and now they’re madly in love and she’s in a super serious bicoastal romance. The book is about a love triangle and it’s loosely called To All The Men I’ve Loved Before. Her first two boyfriends from adulthood come back and then she has to choose. But it will be super feminist-y and food forward.
Virginia
Okay, well, I’m booking it for my book club in two years. Christine, I love that personal journey for you. That sounds amazing.
Jo
She’s just she’s madly in love and so happy.
Virginia
What do you hear from readers? Do people notice the food details in your work often? What do they tell you?
Jo
Yeah, they do. Especially with early readers, we got so much great feedback from readers saying, “oh my gosh, the shrimp scene,” where it’s like a prelude to sex with her husband. There’s not that many happy scenes with her husband, but this one is where he’s popping garlicky buttery shrimp in her mouth. And there’s so many delicious smells wafting around the house.
We also have her daily routine is stopping and picking up her Chick-fil-A and her French fries and just how much she loves it. So many readers responded to that. They’re like, “that’s my lunch routine, too! I get my my basket of chicken and I sit and I read on a bench and like that is my perfect lunch.”
So more readers than I expected are commenting on that to me and I think the comments come because people are—no pun intended—actually hungry for it.
When I was writing the Sicily book, I kept thinking about Eat, Pray, Love, which has a lot to recommend it but also just fetishized the eating in a way that I didn’t love.
Virginia
Yeah. I agree.
Jo
And I didn’t want to do that. I was very intentional about not fetishizing the eating, just making it a part of the story.
Virginia
I don’t know Liz Gilbert and her eating habits, so this is not a comment her, but I think sometimes I can tell the difference between an author who’s including food because they love food, and an author who’s including food because maybe they don’t let themselves love food.
Jo
That is an important distinction. And I can also tell that right off the bat.
For a long time, I thought that I had to be a certain size and that that mattered so much to me. It was after having having my babies and watching my body change and watching my body be so strong and do these things that I was like, size doesn’t matter to me anymore. I want to be happy and I want to be healthy and strong. But the happiness part is a really big thing to me. I got so much happier. I find so much joy in so many of your newsletters because I got so much happier when I stopped thinking about it all the time. When I stopped thinking about size and just enjoying my life in a way that I wish I could have when I was younger and in a way that I would like for my daughters.
Virginia
It’s hard to explain to someone who’s in it, how much brain space and energy it frees up to step out of it. There’s a lot of privilege we need to name and not everybody can step out of it that easily. I don’t want to simplify that. But really, once you are on the other side, or even just somewhere in the middle but closer to the other side, it’s kind of amazing to have that.
Jo
My daughter is the most beautifully adventurous eater. She’ll try anything and she loves almost anything. Except mozzarella sticks. She rejects beige food. She’s like, “mozzarella sticks are disgusting.”
Virginia
Well, that’s wrong, but okay.
Jo
I’m like, that’s not true, but she really revels in it. She loves that she loves food. This is just a message that I never got as a kid. I remember my mom doing sweating to the oldies video and always being on SlimFast or Jenny Craig or Nutrisystem—the fact that I can just rattle these companies off from my childhood brain.
And my daughter is probably going to be fucked up for so many other reasons, but that’s not gonna be one of them.
Virginia
Let’s talk about kids books a little bit, since you mentioned this was when you first started thinking about it. Are there any kids books you love for food or any kids books you’ve been horrified about the food?
Jo
So the book that really got me thinking about this was Blubber.
Virginia
Blubber is rough. Man, it is rough.
Jo
It’s so rough. I was down in Key West at Judy Blume’s awesome bookstore and bought copies of all the books and had Judy sign a bunch of them for the kids. Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, As Long As We’re Together, Sally J. Friedman. I love Judy. She’s one of the reasons that I wanted to be a writer because I devoured all of Judy’s books as a kid.
And then I paused at Blubber—it has a new cover now. Do you remember the cover when we were younger? It is burned in my brain. It’s the little girl standing in front of a chalkboard.
Virginia
Yes, yes.
Jo
And girls are snickering at her. And, by the way, there’s nothing to even discuss when it comes to this little girl’s size.
Virginia
They didn’t make her fat, which is weird choice. They were like we we need to show the bullying but we can’t even show a fat child on the cover of this.
Jo
We can’t bring ourselves to show a fat child on the cover. She’s drawing a picture of a sperm whale and then in the new Blubber it’s just a whale’s tail with a heart that says Blubber really small, as if the Blubber part of it is shameful, which it is like the whole premise of the book is.
Virginia
I reread it when my oldest daughter was like reading Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. And I was like, I’m going to read this one first before I pass it over to her.
Jo
You can’t pass it on.
Virginia
I didn’t pass it on. Because the way they treat the fat character, she is a non-entity in the book. She has no agency, she is just a student that gets made fun of. The parents never correct the bullying. There’s no reclaiming of her body as a good body. It’s very much a product of its time. But also, unfortunately, what’s happening to fat kids today, as well.
Jo
It’s still happening. I was like, Is this a good book to start discussions about bullying? Like, as a conversation point? And I’m like, nope, not even that. I can’t save Blubber. So that one, I think is what a lot of like people our age think about when we think about these children’s books that failed us and also drilled these stereotypes into our heads that were already in our heads as we were watching our mothers go through the diet culture of the 80’s and the 90’s.
Virginia
The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Junk Food by Stan and Jan Berenstain is another one that I think lives really large in people’s heads. I had forgotten how bad it was. There was a meme on Instagram last week and I shared the meme about it and all these people were in my DMs like “this was the book that screwed me up so much!” But what was interesting about it was several people said to me, “I read this book as a kid because the drawings of the food were so appealing, I just focused on how good the food looked.” And I thought that was so interesting. Maybe there’s a way to subversively reclaim The Berenstain Bears, to celebrate the food part of it without the rest. But still, this is not one I would read to my kids today without being able to have a very nuanced conversation about it.
Jo
I didn’t remember that until you just mentioned it. The food did look good.
Virginia
They were good illustrations of food. Berenstain Bears is such a weird series in general.
Jo
It’s problematic for a lot of for a lot of different reasons.
Virginia
Gender norms, Christianity. There’s just a lot packed in there but that one is really a dark spot.
Jo
In most of the picture books that I read for kids, I have noticed that there are a lot of fatter bodies on kids these days and bodies of all different sizes.
Virginia
For picture books, my favorites are Our Little Kitchen by Jillian Tamaki, which is a lovely, beautiful food celebration book about these neighbors in a community kitchen making a really amazing dinner together. There are queer folks, there are disabled folks, there are fat folks. There are kids. That’s a favorite. My favorite line that’s become canon in my family is there’s a line where someone’s like, “chili again?” and the guy at the stove is like, “Those who don’t cook don’t get to complain.” And my kids know that if they sit down to the table and whine, I’m just like, “Those who don’t cook don’t get to complain.” And the other night, they were like, “but why not?” And I was like, “because we are making labor visible!” They were not thrilled about it. But they do love the book. It’s really joyful with that excellent moral lesson.
And then Big by Vashti Harrison, which just came out and is a really beautiful one about a fat ballerina. It does center on her being told she’s taking up too much space but there’s a reclaiming. I think those books are really important and we need the books where the characters just fat and nobody is really talking about it.
We’re still building up that repertoire for sure. My favorite middle grade novel. hands down—I used a quote from it as the front quote in Fat Talk—is Starfish by Lisa Fipps, which is just exquisite. Heart wrenching. Such a powerful book.
Jo
My kids really like Bodies Are Cool.
Virginia
Oh, yeah. Tyler Feder, she’s great. She’s been on the pod. Tyler is amazing. My older daughter is now obsessed with her Dancing at the Pity Party graphic memoir about her dead mom, which is more of an adult book, but Violet is really running with that one right now.
Jo
That sounds wonderful.
Virginia
It’s a really fantastic memoir. Tyler is brilliant.
Jo
My kids love Bodies Are Cool because of the hair and stretch marks which look more like our bodies.
Virginia
She was so meticulous about how much diversity she included in that one. I mean, there’s kids with scars. There’s kids with the diabetes port.
Jo
The woman with the prosthetic foot. There’s all there’s all of it.
My kids both don’t like Disney movies because a parent always dies in them and they’re scary and there’s always like a really, really bad villain. So I let them watch age inappropriate musicals. So they watch Mamma Mia and Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again and Grease and all the adult stuff goes over their heads. They just like the dancing. Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again has the best body inclusive dance sequence.
Virginia
I never saw it.
Jo
I’m going to send you the video for Waterloo. There’s all shapes and all sizes. There’s an amazing dancer in a wheelchair. She has the coolest dance moves and she’s spinning around, but they never talk about it. It’s just like, oh, this is just a wildly inclusive musical dance scene. My kids notice it, though. They’ve said, “There is everyone in this dance scene!”
[Virginia’s post-recording note: The scene is fantastic and I’ll never say a bad word about Abba, but while it’s great on race and ability, the number doesn’t have much fat rep. Mamma Mia 3: Fat Dancing Queens, please!]
Virginia
I mean, I loved Mamma Mia. I am now really wrestling with how I didn’t see Mamma Mia Two and I need to fix that.
Jo
You should probably fix it. It’s a slower burn than Mamma Mia One. But that said, Cher is in it And the last song is “Fernando,” which is missing from Mamma Mia One.
Virginia
It’s a huge oversight. Okay, well, I’ll be fixing that this weekend.
Butter
Jo
Well, when I read the description of what you wanted for butter, I immediately did think of toast.
Virginia
Everybody does.
Jo
There’s this farm called Weed Family Orchards in the in the Hudson Valley and they do pick your own, so we always stop there on our way to the Catskills. They have this jalapeno jelly that I eat with a spoon.
Virginia
That sounds so good.
Jo
It’s the perfect mix of spicy and sweet and salty. I put it on everything. I put it on toast. But I’ve also put it on steak. I really like thinly sliced seared steak with jalapeno jelly. It’s really chef’s kiss.
Then my non-toast recommendation is a book that just came out today, which I loved so much called The Whispers by Ashley Audrain who wrote the thriller The Push a few years ago. It digs into women and desire and wanting more than we’re allowed to have in life. It’s also a thriller in just such a smart way and I think Ashley is a national treasure. I finished it a few months ago and I’m actually really happy to get to recommend her book on her pub day today because I think that people will really really love reading it. It’s a great great summer read.
Virginia
Those are both excellent butters! Mine is—I put this in a newsletter recently that I was thinking about purchasing some ice cream bowls from East Fork and I feel like people might want closure on that anecdote, to know that I did purchase the ice cream bowls. They are being delivered today. So this is an anticipatory butter, but I’m very excited about it.
Jo
Tell me which ones you ordered! I am an East Fork freak. My friend Regan is the one who wrote that style section cover story about them that was so good.
Virginia
So, I have The Mugs and last year for Christmas, I got Corinne and Tommy, who both work on the podcast, the mugs because I was like we all need the mugs. It’s very important. And now I have a couple of the big bowls for pasta. I got those last year at some point as a little gift to myself. So I’m easing into my East Fork era, because it’s pricey.
Jo
Yeah, it feels like a collector’s item. For my birthday last year I got the rainbow bowls that were limited.
Virginia
I got the ice cream bowls in the piglet color which is like a blush pink they just did. It’s sort of funny because like neither of my kids like pink. But I was like, this will be for our ice cream time and I will be happy that the bowls are pink and they’ll just be excited about ice cream time. Then I also got a couple of the bitty bowls, the little ones and I got those in the butter color because how can I not get them in butter?
I’m not really sure what we’re going to use the bitty bowls for, I admit that was an impulse purchase. I’d gone in for the ice cream bowls.
Jo
How small are they?
Virginia
Well, I’ll tell you when they arrived because I got the notification they’re being delivered today. My understanding is they would be for if you’re putting out like small toppings of things or like nuts or something.
Jo
I bought similar bowls when we were on my eat-my-way-through-Paris babymoon in September. They’re small and I bought them at like a street fair and I use them to put honey on a cheese plate or like I put my jalapeno jam in them.
Virginia
I was just about to say, you could decant the jelly into this.
So yeah, like I said, that was an impulse, but I’m excited about it.
Jo
I feel good about that.
[Post-recording note from Virginia: All the bowls arrived and are fantastic! We’re using the ice cream bowls constantly for both ice cream and sides of fruit on the dinner table. The bitty bowls are indeed the perfect size for jam, or for snacking on my beloved dark chocolate chips.]
Virginia
Jo, thank you. This was delightful. It’s so fun to talk to you. Tell folks where they can find you how we can support your work.
Jo
So much of my stuff remains on the Instagram even though I don’t love Instagram, but it’s the easiest way to just post where I’m going to be and what books are coming out. So that’s @jopiazzaauthor and then I’m doing
which I’ve been doing for two months. I love Substack so much, it just it feels like the first nice place for writers to land on the internet in a really long time. So yeah, those are the two places. I’m also just around in the world. I love running into all of you in real life. And I’ll be in your hot tub.
Virginia
Soon to be located in my hot tub!
Awesome. Thank you, Jo.