Sutanya Dacres on Writing Memoir

Telling the story you want to tell

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Kate Leahy opens this week’s episode with an excellent question: “Many people have amazing life stories to tell, but what does it take to turn one of those stories into a memoir?” The answer, I believe, lies in understanding the distinction between memoir and autobiography: memoir is not a matter of telling your entire life story, no matter how incredible the story, nor how masterfully you convey it. The real art and craft of becoming a memoirist requires figuring out which stories to tell and then how best to tell them.

Sutanya Dacres at her 1st restaurant pop-up in Paris

This week’s guest, Sutanya Dacres, explains how choosing the story she wanted to tell in her first book, Dinner for One: How Cooking in Paris Saved Me, A Memoir (Park Row Books, 2022), meant leaving out so many of the bigger stories of her family and her New York City upbringing. “For me,” Sutanya explains, “memoir is about sharing a specific moment in my life that was quite impactful and changed and shifted the trajectory of my life.”

In our conversation, Sutanya explains that while the story she relates in her book is deeply personal (it conveys all the real-life messiness of falling in and out of love), it’s also not her whole story - nor do we want it to be. “Memoir can be daunting, because you feel you have to tell everything,” she responds when we ask about the process of sifting through her experiences to decide what parts to tell and what to leave out. The key, we learn, is to find events that can carry the weight of the story you are trying to tell, and to use these to create a framework for the narrative arc.

Sutanya’s “anti-fairytale” memoir

During our interview, I referenced a favorite line from writer Rebecca Solnit¹ about storytelling — “a story is just a cup of water scooped from the sea” — and asked how Sutanya figured out the framework for the story she wanted to tell.

In Dinner for One, Sutanya starts in the middle of her story: the Prologue drops us into the painful aftermath of her breakup, and then the narrative circles back to the beginning. Subsequent chapters revolve around single events, including a random meeting at a bar in lower Manhattan, a solo lunch of Moules à la Normande in a Parisian restaurant, a botched hair appointment at a posh salon, and her first attempt at making a classic Tarte Tatin. Taken on their own, like stars in the night sky, these singular events wouldn’t create a compelling narrative, but stitched together into constellations, they convey a compelling story, filled with emotion, consequences, and pathos.

"We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit where and who we are." - from The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit

Our conversation with Sutanya offers many lessons for anyone interested in writing a memoir, but it’s also filled with inspiration for writers of any stripe. Be curious. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Pay attention. Take notes. “All good writers should eavesdrop,” Sutanya urges. You never know when your notes and journals might become source material for the story you want to tell.

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Links from the episode:

• Dinner For One podcast

• Sutanya’s Instagram

• Dinner for One: How Cooking in Paris Saved Me (A Memoir), by Sutanya Dacres

• The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit

• In Writing podcast with Hattie Crisell

• Leigh Eisenman, literary agent

• Eat Pray Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert

• When in French: Love in a Second Language, by Lauren Collins

• Check out the Everything Cookbooks Bookshop to browse all books mentioned in the show (purchasing books here supports the show, independent bookstores, and authors. A win-win-win! 🏆)

Next week on EVCB:

Rick Martínez joins us in Episode #129 to talk about his second cookbook, Salsa Daddy, published in April 2025. Rick shares why he wanted to write this specific book, how it changed him as a cook, and what he hopes to convey about “the heart and soul of México—its people, its history, its flavors.” He also leaves us with a tease for a third cookbook.

Bye for now. I’ll be back here next week and hope to see you. In the meantime, keep on writing, reading, and cooking. ✍️📚🍳

Molly and the EVCB gang

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1. Rebecca Solnit is an American writer, historian, activist, and “author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and urban history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and catastrophe.” Find her newsletter here.