What drew you to writing The Dead Husband Cookbook?
I spent three years working on my first adult novel, Delicate Condition, and it was harrowing! After, I knew I was going to have to come up with an idea for a follow-up novel and I came up with a ton of ideas, none of them quite right. It was definitely one of those moments where I was like, you know…maybe I’m never writing another novel.
Then, one day, my husband and I were up in the Catskills having dinner with a friend. She’s also a horror writer, as well as an editor, and I was telling her this idea I had for a book I would write if my husband ever died (morbid, I know, but like I said, we’re both horror novelists.) My husband is a fantastic amateur chef, so the idea was basically that I’d spend a year after his death teaching myself to cook his recipes and then I’d write a memoir about it.
My friend loved this idea, but she had a note. She said that the book would be so much better if, halfway through the memoir, the reader realizes I killed my husband (again, we’re horror novelists, this is how we think…)
How did you find writing this story following the success of your debut adult thriller Delicate Condition?
It was intimidating! Delicate Condition was in the works for over three years, by far the longest I’ve ever worked on a novel. I’ve been a young adult novelist for years, and it took me a really long time to get the tone of an adult thriller just right. There were months –
years, even – where I was convinced that my weird little book would never see the light of day. Even now, hearing it called a “success” is surreal…
I put off working on The Dead Husband Cookbook for a long time because a part of me was worried I wouldn’t be able to do it again, like maybe Delicate Condition was a fluke. But, in the end, writing Dead Husband was so much easier than writing Delicate Condition. I had already learned a lot from making so many mistakes with that first book and working on my second felt much more natural. I feel like I was able to have a lot more fun with this book once I got past my imposter syndrome.
Ambition and hunger are major themes in The Dead Husband Cookbook. Why did you want to explore these ideas, especially in your female characters?
I wound up attending various birth and parenting classes around Brooklyn while pregnant with my daughter, as one does. There’s always a point in these classes where the instructor will go around asking whether anyone has any questions. I specifically remember one of the mothers asking about her career and ambition, wanting to know if it would still feel the same after she had her child, essentially wanting to know whether she’d still be herself, whether all the things that mattered to her before would still matter after. And it was the craziest thing, as soon as she asked that, every woman in the class went quiet. We all wanted to know the answer. We had all wanted to ask the question, only we couldn’t figure out how to phrase it.
Women are ambitious. We want things that have nothing to do with family. And it’s a tricky spot to be in because, our whole lives, we’re served this message that we shouldn’t want anything beyond romantic love and family. If you’ve ever watched a Hallmark movie, you know this. The lesson of every single one of them is that chasing a career will leave you empty and alone, you’ll be so much happier moving back to your hometown and marrying that Christmas tree farmer you broke up with in high school. But this propaganda doesn’t make the want go away.
I think all this got conflated with hunger because I was so hungry when I was pregnant. Having grown up under 90s diet culture, and then living in New York City where there’s so much cultural pressure to be thin, I’ve essentially spent my entire adult life restricting my eating and ignoring my hunger. But when you’re pregnant, for the first time, you’re actually encouraged to eat. I spent nine months eating carbs and cheese and it was glorious. But then I had the baby and immediately, the pressure was on to take the weight off, to turn off that hunger. That pressure got twisted up with the pressure to ignore my ambition, until it seemed to be one voice telling me to make myself small, to ignore my ambition, ignore my hunger, to be happy just staying home with my baby. And because I’m a contrarian, my response was basically, no thank you, I’d rather not, so that’s where the themes you’re finding in Dead Husband are coming from.
You used to work in publishing. How did your experiences of the industry feed into the writing of the literary world in The Dead Husband Cookbook?
Can I just tell you how much I LOVED being able to use my experiences in publishing to inform this novel? The publishing world is so weird and wonderful, and I remember my days in the industry with such fondness. Publishing is also one of those industries, like architecture or law, that people have endless curiosity about, so I knew I could throw in some juicy details for the voyeurs out there…
Thea, specifically, was a fun character to create. She was something of an amalgam of a lot of real women I’ve known in my life. There’s a trope about women who work in publishing, that they’re quiet or meek, or maybe even a little nerdy. But the thing is, to be a good editor, you have to be competitive and driven. It’s such an interesting contrast, and it creates for these really amazingly complicated people. For Thea, I really leaned into both sides of this contradiction, making her both quiet and driven, nerdy and fierce. I wanted you to feel her that her ambition was driving every decision she was making, even if her decision was to stay quiet or wait or keep her fears to herself.
Can you tell us more about the cookbook element of your latest novel? How did you go about curating the recipes that appear throughout?
This is my favourite part of my book! As I mentioned earlier, my husband is an amateur chef. As long as I’ve known him, he’s been compiling recipes he’s created –incredible recipes – that he’s written just for himself, because he loves doing it. I’ve always wanted him to try to get them published, and with this book I jumped at the opportunity to get at least a few of them out in the world. He’s truly incredibly talented and I can’t wait for people to try cooking his food. The meatball recipe, specifically, is so good! The story I included at the beginning of the book, about how Damien found the recipes in his grandmother’s freezer and recreated them over the course of a year is based on the real story of how my husband, Ron, came up with the recipe.
What’s your writing process and do you have any tips for aspiring authors?
My writing process is very strict! I’ve honed it over the course of around 16 years as a professional writer, and I go through every step of my process, from idea to final draft on my TikTok channel (@daniellevalentinebooks.) The gist of it is that I start with an idea, then do a massive brain dump where I just write down every thought I have about what the book could be, and then aggressively outline – sometimes for several months – and then I write a draft as fast as I can. My goal is always to get this ‘trash’ draft, which is terribly written but (hopefully) wonderfully plotted, so that I can spend the rest of the time I have with the manuscript tinkering and editing and making the writing all pretty.
What are you working on next? Is there another thriller in the pipeline?
Always ☺ I have a new Young Adult novel coming out next year, sort of a Squid Game meets Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory sort of thing about a bunch of teens who get sent to a school that isn’t what they expected. And I’m planning to start working on a new adult idea very soon. I can’t say anything about it yet, but I promise it will be twisty and angry, just like all my other books.
