Forking Good Book Release Day!

Holy Forking Shirtballs!

Our quirky cookbook inspired by The Good Place and full of puns and philosophical meandering is out in the world today! Thank you to Quirk Books, our editor Jhanteigh Kupihea, our illustrator Dingding Hu, and the entire team at Quirk who helped to bring it into the world!

What does book release day look like for this author?

Two misplaced coffee mugs (still full) that I set down someplace until they promptly vanished (fairies, I know), dry shampoo in the eye, a quick breakfast and kid drop-off after minor sock drama, day job login and morning email, internet connectivity issues and phone camera malfunction (I know, I know, they are going to stop supporting iphone 6 soon, my son keeps reminding me) and finally a moment to post this announcement!

This book is a special blend of so many things that I love.  I’ve come to realize that writing and cooking are my creative yin and yang. One enables me to immerse myself in the blissfully solitary imaginative introvert-friendly space of creating stories; while the other allows me to prepare robust sensory meals to be shared with people I love in a setting of open-hearted conversation.

With writing, there is certainly the eventual sharing with an audience and that is a delight, but it’s delayed most of the time and generally less intimate that the sharing of a meal.

I hope that you can find something to delight you in Forking Good, whether that’s a recipe you enjoy or a provocative anecdote that sparks a conversation. I hope that it makes you laugh and think and react and respond. This book, its meals and its playful philosophical contemplation are meant to be shared and talked about, especially as we approach the end of the season and show, The Good Place.

We would love to see photos of your meals and tv-watching parties where Forking Good plays a part. Please tag them! #ForkingGood or #ForkingGoodCookbook. We’ll figure out where the best place to post some will be. Stay tuned for more on that!

You can get our Forking Good cookbook in bookstores and online, and if you have a few minutes to write a review on Amazon or Goodreads, please do! It really really helps! (Thank you to those who have already done so!)

We’ll also have our New York launch party this weekend, and Chicago the weekend after that! We would love to see you, share some food and drink, sign books, and talk about life, afterlife, cooking, philosophy, and The Good Place! (Plus if you are in New York, you can meet our amazing illustrator Dingding Hu!)

We hope you enjoy Forking Good. We are so excited to share it with you!

 

Our New Book Announcement is Forking Good!

After several people we know and love told us that we really should be watching NBC’s The Good Place, Stephen and I finally made time for it. We loved it and rewatched it with the kids in time for Season 3 to begin.

For those of you who are not yet familiar, the show begins with Eleanor Shellstrop, who wakes up dead one day, welcomed into “the Good Place” as a reward for living such a good life. She is given her dream home, a heavenly neighborhood, and a soulmate. The only problem is that Eleanor realizes there has been a terrible mistake. She is the wrong Eleanor Shellstrop. They think she was a noble, self-sacrificing activist. The truth is, she lived a selfish, morally questionable life.

Realizing that she does not deserve to be in the Good Place, Eleanor convinces her soulmate, Chidi Anagonye, a moral philosopher, to help her learn how to become a good person and hopefully earn her spot in the Good Place…so that she does not have to suffer an eternity of torture in the Bad Place. The show follows Eleanor and her new squad of dead friends as they try to navigate the experience of afterlife living in the Good Place.

The cast of ‘‘The Good Place,’’ from left: Manny Jacinto, Jameela Jamil, Ted Danson, D’Arcy Carden, William Jackson Harper and Kristen Bell. Jeff Minton for The New York Times
The cast of ‘‘The Good Place,’’ from left: Manny Jacinto, Jameela Jamil, Ted Danson, D’Arcy Carden, William Jackson Harper and Kristen Bell. Jeff Minton for The New York Times

The show has a big heart and a smart (and not mean-spirited!) sense of humor that is often peppered with puns, and not just clever puns…but clever food puns.

Those of you who know me, know that I love food—preparing it, sharing it, and savoring it. In many ways, food IS my philosophy. (Another blog post on that soon.)

Those of you who know Stephen, know that the part of his brain that makes puns (just like the part of his brain that makes up song lyrics à la “Weird Al” Yankovic in perfect melody to match almost any situation) never stops working. Never. Puns are as central to his worldview as food is to mine.

One morning after watching a particularly funny The Good Place episode, Stephen and I were driving to work, and Stephen was making puns (as he does) inspired by the show. I groaned but joined in, and we tossed around several philosophy-pun-inspired recipe titles for food that fans of The Good Place would probably appreciate..

The light turned red, and we looked at each other and knew we had to pitch it to Quirk Books, our Geek Parenting publisher, because if a fan cookbook inspired by the show didn’t already exist, we needed to write it. We spent the weekend brainstorming, pitched it, and Forking Good was born.

This appeared in today’s Publisher’s Lunch:

The Good Place creator Michael Schur does a brilliant job of creating a vivid world and lovable, flawed characters. We intend for our cookbook to be a love letter to the show—to food, to puns, and to philosophy.

The show loves its characters, and so we grow to care about them too. Through three seasons, we cheer them on to become better, and perhaps along the way, it get us thinking about how we can also become better people too.

In a really wonderful New York Times story from last October, Schur is quoted saying, “We’ll keep trying as long as we can. We’ll keep trying. No one is perfect. No one will ever win the race to be the best person. It’s impossible. But, especially since starting this show, I just think everyone should try harder. Including me.”

Schur cites writer David Foster Wallace as a personal inspiration in several podcasts and interviews. he frequently references the following quote from a 1993 interview with Wallace. After reading it, I’ve printed it out and keep it posted nearby my writing space:

Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.

We are so excited to bring you Forking Good with Quirk as our wonderful publisher (Just in time for Season 4!), and the whimsical art of Dingding Hu is going to be such a fun complement for our writing and recipes! We hope that you’ll watch the show, enjoy the book, make and share some recipes, and celebrate what’s human and magical in our world. Because no one knows what actually comes next; but right here and now, we have each other, and we can make art, we can make delicious food, we can make communities of people we love, we can make memories to cherish, and that’s what we want in our Good Place.