If Krys Malcolm Belc’s first memoir, 2021’s The Natural Mother of the Child, was about sowing the seeds of LGBTQ+ family-making, his latest, What I Made for Dinner, concerns itself with what it means to keep that family fueled and nourish oneself simultaneously.
In What I Made for Dinner, Belc traces his complex yet often-romantic relationship with food preparation over the course of his life; like so many of us, he cooked his way through the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and reading his clear-eyed and thoughtful exploration of being primarily responsible for feeding himself, his wife, and their four children is a beautiful reminder of how both elemental and sacred a homemade meal can be.
This week, Vogue spoke to Belc about celebrating pub day with (possible) baked ziti, his hottest take on cooking for kids, the benefits and limitations of the “trans memoir” genre, and more.
Vogue: First things first: What are you cooking and/or eating to celebrate pub day?
Krys Malcolm Belc: This morning, I made a banana chocolate-chip snacking cake that I kind of adapted from a Melissa Clark recipe. I don’t know what I want to do for dinner, honestly. It feels momentous, but I also don’t want to do anything, which feels very me. [Laughs.] I don’t know, maybe I’ll make a baked ziti or something.
That sounds great. Are any of your kids old enough to be interested in cooking?
They are very interested, but they’re kind of annoyed because I’m a little territorial. It’s actually an incredible amount of work to teach someone to cook, which I should know, because I wrote an entire book about this. But I think in practice I hadn’t realized how difficult it is even to teach a kid to fry an egg. It’s on my summer agenda to work with them on learning a few basic dishes each.
How does the experience of publishing your second memoir compare to your first?
I feel a lot more calm and happy the second time. I think the first time, I felt a lot of turmoil because I didn’t know what would happen. The narrator of a memoir is the person who wrote the memoir, but I felt like the first book had a very different narrative voice and was much more about making interesting art out of life experiences, and the second one to me felt more about trying to get to the center of emotional truth. That felt a lot more like a project where I could identify whether it had worked or not, so I do feel a little bit more straightforwardly happy about how it turned out. I had never really spent any time with writers before my first book came out; I didn’t have any friends who were writers, particularly, so I just didn’t really know what to expect or what it would feel like, and now I have a lot more writers in my life. It’s not that I didn’t have support the first time, it’s just that I have a little bit more targeted support now.
Do cooking and writing feel inextricably linked for you now, or do they feel like separate processes where you can put one aside to focus on the other?
They feel extremely different to me. Occasionally I’ll make something that is really ambitious and takes a few days—like the first time I make croissants, which is kind of a whole big process—but I do feel like cooking is something that I do to get the dopamine hit of accomplishment. It’s something you can just decide to do that day at any given moment, and writing feels a lot more tortured. It takes extremely long time to figure out what you’re even doing when you’re writing, and I’m not someone who comes up with my own recipes, particularly. Like, I’ll tweak something I’ve made a number of times, but I use the kitchen to feel accomplished, and I use writing for communication and emotional gratification.
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