Growing up in a family of butchers and food lovers, I was surrounded by the sights and sounds and smells of cooking from an early age. But the truth is that I fell in love with cooking through reading, and I learned quickly that being in the kitchen offered me the kind of peace that settling in with a good book did. For the first half of my life I used both activities as a way to draw inward and escape from a world that I often found overwhelming. I connected deeply to the characters in my books, and cooking the foods that they were eating seemed to me a natural way to be closer to them, to make them as real as they felt to me.

I cooked and read my way through awkward middle school years, first love, devastating heartbreaks, loss, and change. As I grew older, though, reading and cooking became the forces that broke me out of my shell, allowing me to form strong relationships and connect to the world around me.

I moved to New York City in 2004 to study literature at NYU, and I quickly found myself working in restaurants, first as a server and a barista, and eventually as a line cook, baker, and butcher at some of Brooklyn’s best-loved spots. Studying literature and working in kitchens, I was, for the first time, surrounded by people who loved books and food as much as I did, and it awakened me to the fact that the connection between food and literature is one that is felt deeply by many, many people.

In the locker rooms of the restaurants where I worked, I noticed my coworkers’ backpacks spilling over with well-worn novels. It turned out that Hemingway and Faulkner, Morrison and Plath, were part of their lives, too, comforting them the way they comforted me, through long days of oven burns and broken emulsions. While preparing for service, picking herbs, and parcooking fillets, we talked about short stories we had recently read and everyone’s own half-written coming-of-age novel. Eating dinner at the apartments of my English-major friends, I was pleasantly surprised by how well prepared all of the food was, and how seamlessly the conversation switched from new books to new cast-iron skillets.

On my friends’ bookshelves, next to the obvious college-student staples like Moby-Dick and Ulysses, sat well-thumbed volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In between writing their own poetry and personal essays, they were bussing tables and running food, making coffee and selling high-end chocolates in restaurants and shops all over New York.

In 2008 I started a literary supper club out of my tiny, sweltering apartment, with the goal of bringing my friends’ best-loved literary meals to life. When I could no longer keep up with the demand for the dinner parties, I started the blog Yummy Books, and through the success of Yummy Books, Voracious was born.

While doing research for this book, I took a trip home to spend some time with my childhood books. It had been many years since I had read most of them, and I felt oddly nervous on the bus ride to Boston, in the way you might feel waiting to meet a friend you haven’t seen since you were small. Would we even recognize each other? When I got home I went straight up to the attic, where I spent the rest of the day and most of the night surrounded by my old friends. I was amazed at how well I still knew them, how reading them—even holding them and studying their covers—transported me back to specific moments in my life with startling immediacy. What struck me most, though, was how many of them had their food scenes marked up with purple pencil, their back covers scrawled with imagined recipes. I had forgotten how long ago my fascination—my obsession—with food scenes in books had started.

Hosting literary dinner parties, developing recipes inspired by books for my blog, and writing this book have reinforced for me the profound connection between eating and reading. And along the way I’ve discovered, to my delight, how deeply this connection is felt by so many of you.