This Is the Author

"My book is about eating snacks and being mad. I wrote my book because I’d already written one and that was pretty fun. I was inspired by revenge; I want everyone who ever doubted me or was ever mean to me to see that I have a book in bookstores and feel really bad about their own lives."

"The book is inspired by three of my mentors: Viktor Frankl, Joseph Campbell, and Carl Jung. It is based on their teaching and learnings. I talk about archetypes and their shadows. Within each of us there are a polarity of character. One will lead us to greatness and one will lead us to our gaps."

"My book is about an extremely consequential 12-month period in American history, and also in the history of my family and my own maturation. Being 11 and 12 is a very interesting time of life, when you, for the first time, begin to establish your frame of reference for the world outside of your experience at home. And, in my case, it was a discovery of history as an inescapable current. We were all writing. These were dangerous years."

"As a writer for Fortune magazine, I look for the biggest, most important, most interesting, most colorful business stories, period. I also have lived in Silicon Valley for almost 20 years now. And so, as Uber was exploding on the scene, it fairly quickly became obvious to me that that was the story that had all the qualities I was looking for…”

"It’s a food history of the modern South that begins in 1955 with the Montgomery bus boycotts. Women who baked cakes and pies and sold them literally fueled the bus boycotts. And it ends in 2015 as a newer South comes into focus. A newer South in which tamale makers of Mexican descent are as much a part of the Southern story as anyone else."

"When I was a young actor in New York, I premiered in a show called Sly Fox, which starred the great George C. Scott. I had three lines in the show. Actually, I had one line and I said it three times. It was, 'You look wonderful, sir,' which I added 'oh' to. 'Oh, you look wonderful, sir.' That was free of charge. I remember walking out the stage door one day and there was this legendary autograph hound that went from theater to theater, and he was standing right in front of me as I walked out, and he looked at me and he went, 'Are you anybody?'"

"This story is really about homecoming. It’s about cooking and getting into the world of cooking in all its so many crazy, wild places. From home cooking to the kitchens of New York City, to farmhouse kitchens and warehouse squat kitchens, this book really shows how you can cook well or you can learn something about cooking anywhere you are."

"My book, most generally, is about anxiety. It’s half memoir, about my own anxiety issues that I’ve struggled with for the last twenty-five years, along with a deep dive into the science of anxiety, looking at everything from the genetics to the neuroscience behind anxiety."

"My book, most generally, is about anxiety. It’s half memoir, about my own anxiety issues that I’ve struggled with for the last twenty-five years, along with a deep dive into the science of anxiety, looking at everything from the genetics to the neuroscience behind anxiety."

"My book is about my sexual coming of age and my adolescence and my going off the rails a bit in my mid-life. The book came about because I started writing about my adolescence and it was hard remembering that time. Also, I realized I really hate coming-of-age memoirs and I started to wonder why was I writing one. As a teenager and young adult I had been, well, I was kinda trouble. I was sexually fast and took drugs and dropped outta school and was kinda a bad kid. And I wasn’t quite that bad in mid-life but I started to, sort of, um, wanna get in trouble again. And I realized that was why I was writing about my adolescence. And that the book was really about both of those and how they’re in dynamic with each other."