‘I wanted to show the soft beauty of kitchen culture’: Stephanie Danler on how she went from waiting tables in New York to writing a brilliant novel
Stephanie Danler doesn’t much like the “creation myth” that’s attached to her debut novel, Sweetbitter, but it’s proving as stubborn to shift as a red wine stain. So here it is: Danler was a waitress at a French restaurant in the West Village in Manhattan; one of her regulars was a heavyweight editor at Penguin Random House, Peter Gethers, a man Vanity Fair has called “the biggest name in publishing you’ve never heard of”. She told him she’d written a novel and within days she had a two-book deal worth in the high six figures. Sweetbitter, set in a New York restaurant, has become a US bestseller, earned its author comparisons with Jay McInerney and Anthony Bourdain, and been boosted by celebrity admirers (Eva Longoria, Sarah Jessica Parker).
It’s an appealingly dramatic yarn, but a simplification. Danler was working as a waitress – that much is true – but by 2014, when she pitched Gethers, her escape route from restaurants was already plotted out. Sweetbitter was the product of many years work, in part on a post-graduate writers’ programme, and Danler already had an agent. She met 11 publishers in a frenzied week and there were multiple offers before she decided to sign with Gethers and Penguin Random House. She chose them in part because she knew and trusted Gethers, but the bottle of premier cru burgundy she was presented with was, she admits, a winning touch.
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There’s nothing about servers doing cocaine that felt revelatory to me at all