Chasing the dream: An interview with author Debbie Koenig

Strive to achieve those big dreams for our lives, which can seem unobtainable when we have kids and mortgages and greater responsibilities.

Some of the most inspirational stories come from people whose dreams have come true. For Debbie Koenig, a mother of one and food writer who writes Words to Eat By, that moment came when her cookbook, Parents Need to Eat Too, was published last month. “I don’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a writer,” says Koenig.

I recently caught up with Koenig to chat about her new book, her dream and what’s next.

Finding her dream

SheKnows: Tell me a little about your dream of being a published author.

Debbie Koenig: I majored in creative writing in college. After I won the fiction prize at graduation, I figured I’d have a short story in The New Yorker before I was 25, and a novel published before I was 30. That didn’t exactly work out. Instead, I spent 15 years working around authors in book publishing before I burned out and left in 2002. Ten years later, my first book has finally come out. It’s not a novel, obviously, but each chapter of the cookbook opens with a personal essay. I agonized over every word, just as I did with my fiction. Every time I catch a glimpse of the cover now I get a little giddy — after all this time, someone believed in my talent enough to publish my book. Not the Great American Novel, but something with value all its own.

Going for it

SheKnows: What road blocks did you encounter? How did you get around them?

DK: I was my own biggest roadblock — when my first submissions were rejected (or worse, ignored), my confidence drooped, and drooped some more, until it landed down on the subway tracks with all the rats and garbage. I became convinced that my early success had been a fluke. I didn’t write a word that wasn’t work-related for my last 10 years in publishing, and for a long time I thought that was my true calling — I was really good at marketing other people’s books, and I was running a department with a dozen people in it. But once I left that world, writing for pleasure came right back to me. My plan was to open a gourmet shop, but in the time it took for me to learn the ropes from my mentor (and discover I did not, in fact, want to own a shop), I started writing daily again. This time, about food.

SheKnows: What was your first reaction when you realized Parents Need to Eat Too was going to be published?

DK: Relief. Enormous relief — someone other than my immediate family appreciated my work enough to publish it! I cried on the phone with my husband, and again with my mother, and hugged the cat, and did many little happy dances around the room. That exhilaration lasted a few hours, until I thought about the huge amount of work ahead of me. Selling the book wasn’t the end — it was only the beginning.

What’s next?