Please tell us about your new book, This Feast of a Life, and what inspired you to tell this story.

This Feast of a Life centres on the lives of two teenagers, Auden and Valerie. Auden is learning how to cook from their parents, and they start a food blog where they can record their family’s recipes along with the stories that come with them. It’s also a space for them to use their new name, Auden, which they just picked for themself and don’t feel comfortable using anywhere else yet. 

Valerie’s mum, who loved cooking, passed away over a year ago – and the kitchen’s been left unused because Valerie and her dad both don’t know how to cook. But when Valerie discovers Auden’s food blog, it sparks a curiosity about food and cooking – as well as about the writer of the blog. Soon Auden and Valerie are meeting up and reviewing restaurants together, but will they figure out what it is that they’re truly hungry for in their lives? 

The initial idea for the book came from thinking about food blogs and how everyone always complains about the long preamble you have to scroll through before you get to the recipe. But sometimes I actually find the preamble kind of charming! So I thought: what if you fell in love with someone through reading their recipe preambles? It’s not quite what happens in the book in the end, but that’s the nugget of an idea that I started with.

This book is told in dual narrative from both Auden and Valerie’s points-of-view. Did this style of narration come naturally to you as you explored each character and their individual voices before writing?

I always knew that it had to be dual narrative based on the story I was trying to tell, which boiled down to this: the love story of two chaotic bisexuals who are deeply terrified of committing to a relationship for very different reasons. (Or at least Auden thinks of themself as bisexual in the beginning of the book, although their understanding of their sexuality evolves.) 

It’s crucial to the book that Auden and Valerie have extremely contrasting approaches to romance and dating, and I wanted to give them both equal space to explore their feelings.

The theme of food and how it brings us closer together is weaved beautifully throughout this book, and the bond strengthened between Auden and Valerie over Auden’s food blog is really inspiring. Have you ever written a food blog yourself, or been inspired by any in particular?

I’ve never written a food blog, but I was a book blogger for a while. That and my experiences in fandom as well showed me what it was like to connect with someone online through a shared interest, and how absolutely vital some of those connections can feel. 

I’m very inspired by a lot of food blogs I come across! I especially love the Woks of Life, written by a family of four Chinese American cooks who also share stories from their travels. I love the warm vibe of this blog and the fact that there’s a whole family working on it together.  

Similarly, Made with Lau is a blog created by the son of a Chinese chef, to share his father’s recipes with the world, and the recipes are so wonderful because they’re also accompanied by videos of his father making them.

Auden and Valerie have very different home lives and family dynamics; Auden is a non-binary teen within a busy, larger family while Valerie handles the grief of her mother’s passing (alongside a drifting relationship with her father) almost entirely alone. Was this dichotomy of home life important to explore when writing This Feast of a Life?

Yes, absolutely. As mentioned above, part of the joy of writing a dual narrative book is contrast, and it was fun to flesh out what makes Auden and Valerie so different. I loved writing a bigger, bustling family and exploring the pros and cons of being the baby of that family. It was nice to alternate between that and the quiet stillness of Valerie’s life – and I took care to show how important chosen family is, and how Valerie spends a lot of her time with her best friend and her best friend’s older sister. They’re family to her. But there’s still so much emptiness, especially when she goes home. I wanted to contrast that against Auden’s home life to really emphasise what’s missing from Valerie’s. 

However, both Auden and Valerie are in fact quite lonely characters, even if Auden has a much bigger family. I wanted readers to understand that it doesn’t matter how many people you have around you – loneliness comes from not being seen, and neither Auden nor Valerie feel very seen at the beginning of the book.

We love hearing about writers’ journeys at PaperBound! Do you have a writing routine, and can you tell us about your publishing journey so far?

I’d love to say I have a writing routine, but I sadly don’t. Writing my first book and writing my second book felt like such different experiences, and I expect it will be the same every time I write a book – I will have to find a new way to write it. 

I’ve been writing stories ever since I can remember, but I stopped dreaming about publication somewhere along the way. Being selected as a New Voice for Proud, the 2019 LGBTQ+ YA anthology published by Little Tiger, changed my life. It helped me see a path towards writing as a career, and I started working hard on my first novel after that. My first book, If You Still Recognise Me, came out in June 2022, and it was wonderful to be shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and the YA Book Prize in 2023. I love getting messages from readers who tell me that If You Still Recognise Me made them feel less alone, and I hope that This Feast of a Life will reach people in the same way. .

Do you have any advice for writers who want to pen their own young adult stories?

Know why you want to write for young adults, that’s the first thing. For me, it’s because I know how formative books were when I was that age, and how life-saving the right book could be. I felt a lot of things as a teenager that I really relied on books to help me navigate. 

The second thing is to have a very clear understanding of why you want to write this particular story, and what is most important to you about it. Writing a book takes a long time, and sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of why you’re doing it, and the overall shape of the story you want to tell, when you’re in the middle of wrangling plot points and herding characters. So make sure you know the heart of it: what about this story makes you feel alive writing it? Never forget that part. 

I’m always, always fond of writing moments of realisation in romance – when characters realise they want each other, and when characters give into that want.

What was your favourite part of writing this book?

Valerie’s journey with her grief felt very meaningful to me, and I loved giving her the space to express that grief in a variety of ways. 

I’m always, always fond of writing moments of realisation in romance – when characters realise they want each other, and when characters give into that want. This book was no exception! It’s like a roller coaster for me, the ones with the long, slow climb towards the top that feels almost torturous, and then the exhilarating rush of descent at the end. 

And of course, the food! I never tire of writing descriptions of food, honestly.

Cynthia So

Cynthia So is the author of If You Still Recognise Me, which was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and the YA Book Prize in 2023. They were one of the new voices in Proud, an anthology of LGBTQ+ YA stories, poems, and art by LGBTQ+ creators, published in 2019. Their short fiction and poetry have also appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Anathema, among others. Cynthia was born in Hong Kong and lives in London with their wife.