Sweetbitter

by Stephanie Danler

With my novel, Sweetbitter, I was hoping to contribute to, and subvert, two beloved genres: the female coming of age, and the restaurant exposé. How many times had I read a woman’s coming of age story that felt reminiscent of a fairytale? One in which the likeable, plucky heroine falls into danger (oops!) and is rescued (often by a man) in the end? How many times have we seen the tattooed chef (ninety percent of the time, male) yelling in the kitchen, the knives and sizzling pans, the fraternity-style hijinks? I started working in restaurants when I was fifteen years old – a seafood place in Seal Beach, California – and I’ve never worked in another industry (besides writing). Restaurants were my entire education, the lens through which I learned about the world. I learned who had power and who wanted it. I learned how to work. I learned that adults rarely say what they mean. But my restaurant life looked nothing like those chefs I saw on television: it was about culture, sensuality, details. The way one polished a glass, the ballet of moving through the dining room, the pale ruby color of a Burgundy. No one yelled. And though we sweat and ran and ended the night with blisters, we also performed. Our lives unfolded while guests ate their tuna tartar and filet mignon: we fell in and out of love, got sick, made friendships, and made a family. I wanted to show that side of restaurants. As far as coming-of-age tropes go, I’ve never been rescued. It sounds nice, but the women I know have become themselves by making painful mistakes and enduring. I wanted to tell the truth (as I remembered it) about being twenty-two and fresh to New York City and desperately wanting my “real” life to start. Pushing every button to ignite it. Sweetbitter owes a great deal to Portrait of a Lady by Henry James – in that novel, the main emotional artery of the book is a relationship between two women: one young and impressionable, the other older and sophisticated. I knew that there would be a bartender (isn’t there always a bartender?) but once I landed on Tess and Simone, I knew I had a book regardless of where I landed with the other characters. I still think of the book as their love story. I’m often asked about how my life changed since I wrote Sweetbitter and went on to executive produce and write the television series. It’s a question that’s impossible to answer. When I sold Sweetbitter, I was a waitress at Buvette in New York City. I had a manuscript, but there are hundreds of servers with manuscripts in every city. It’s the privilege of calling myself a writer, of making a living at it, that still awes me to this day. Publishing the book took me all over the world. I toured the United States consistently for a year. Then it took me into an entirely new industry: television. When the Sweetbitter show ended, I thought I would be ready to let it go. Relieved to work on something new. For the past seven years, I’ve been living with these characters: imagining Tess and Simone, expanding them, re-creating them with actors, contemplating restaurants, choosing the china, silver, and glass for our gorgeous restaurant set, asking real twenty-two-year olds, Does it still feel like this? But when it was really over, I felt dropped into a void (a void I filled with another book, but a void nonetheless). I miss the characters. Oddly, it’s Simone I miss most of all. The rest, I assume, are recovering from the story in Sweetbitter just fine.

She belonged to herself only. She had edges, boundaries, tastes, definition down to her eyelashes. And when she walked it was clear she knew where she was going.

I’ve been told many times that no one moves to New York City without a specific dream. In my case, I did want to be a writer. But I also had a vision that wasn’t connected to writing. It was a woman (in my head she was Joan Didion in her Vogue days, or Susan Sontag in her Upper West Side apartment – this woman was always surrounded by a drink and books) who created her own rules for how she would participate in the world. While many people certainly do want to be actors, writers, musicians, fashion designers, bankers, it’s false to assume that at twenty-two you know exactly what you want to do. A great number of people, particularly those who end up in restaurants, simply want to become a better, more sophisticated version of themselves. They have grit (how can you live in New York City without it?), and curiosity, but they aren’t necessarily focused. When I’m asked what Tess wanted when she came to New York, I point to this passage. In a way, it reminds of Isabelle Archer in Portrait of a Lady, or other heroines of the nineteenth century, whose ambitions aren’t tied to a profession, but to a vision of self-actualization. To be a woman in command of her own life. That’s what Tess longs for when she leaves Ohio: to be accountable to no one else, to feel the expanse of her freedom. Simone – at least initially – is this vision come to life, which explains why Tess is so drawn to her from the moment she sees her. We’ve all had those men or women who are beacons of who we might become. We tend to outgrow them once we’re not able to idolize them. They’re still the catalysts for change in our lives. That’s what Simone and Jake (and the restaurant) become to Tess.

TASTE, Chef said, is all about balance. The sour, the salty, the sweet, the bitter. Now your tongue is coded. A certain connoisseurship of taste, a mark of how you deal with the world, is the ability to relish the bitter, to crave it even, the way you do the sweet.

These passages are so indebted to the masterful food writers who cast a long shadow over Sweetbitter: Brillat Savarin, MFK Fisher, Patience Gray, writers who understood food as so central to how we cope, show love, and inhabit our days. It’s never solely about food being “delicious.” When I was doing press for Sweetbitter (the book and show) I was often asked about the “best” meal I’ve ever had. An impossible question to answer. Food (and wine for that matter) is so much about context. Where the meal was shared, the time of day, how you felt in your body, how the food met your needs or expectations. It’s not the sixteen-course tasting menu that was so decadent I had to throw up in the middle of it just to keep eating (a true story) that I recall, but a red snapper. I ordered it for myself the day I finished Sweetbitter on a small island in Greece. I had seen the fishermen bring it in off the boat that morning. A whole fish was very much outside my food budget, but I wanted to celebrate. The woman who owned the taverna kept topping off my glass of white wine, and I got fairly drunk and ate the entire fish. That was one of my best meals, but that story isn’t about food. It’s about my sense of accomplishment, about my definitions of luxury, and even my loneliness. Without all sides of that story, the “taste” is incomplete. That’s why bitter remains so important, just as suffering in our lives underscores our contentment or outright joy. I imagine if you recall your “best” meals, you’ll come up with a memory that is about so much more than food.

Any business transaction—actually any life transaction—is negotiated by how you are making the other person feel.”

While Sweetbitter is fiction, I worked exclusively in restaurants from the age fifteen to the age of thirty-one. I’ve worked in some incredible New York City establishments (Union Square Café, Tia Pol, Buvette). While writing I would draw from all my experiences, even the tiny café I worked at through college in Gambier, Ohio. I’ve found that the restaurants I was drawn to – the jobs I really chased – were all places that had a philosophy behind them. It wasn’t enough for me to come in, make my cash, and go home – I wanted to believe that I was participating in something larger than myself. New York City restauranteur Danny Meyer sparked an entire revolution with his hospitality manifesto, Setting the Table. I was a student of that world when I worked in his restaurant, Union Square Café. He saw that we – as servers – were so much more than a disposable, invisible set of hands. We had the opportunity to educate people, elevate their experiences, leave a mark on them. Dining starts the second the guest walks through the door. The way you make eye contact, the way you usher them through a crowded bar, the exact words you chose while greeting them – it all matters. This eye for detail is a business lesson that has overflowed into every area of my life, not the least of which is writing. If you’ve been a server, don’t you find that the lessons translate to any industry?

“We are creating the world as it should be. We don’t have to pay any attention to how it is.”

This is really about fantasy. It’s twofold: the fantasy of a perfectly lit dining room, of being waited on, of taking a break from the mundanity of your real life. It’s also about the fantasies we have in our youth. When we’re young and in the process of creating our “adult” life, we live in a constant present tense. We have unlimited freedom because we haven’t really encountered a sense of consequence yet. In those post-graduate years, you can take jobs or quit jobs, apply for credit cards and book plane tickets, go home with a bartender, and oftentimes it all feels temporary, like you can start over again tomorrow. The hard truths of life (how the world actually operates) haven’t yet penetrated. That’s where Tess is when she arrives in New York. The restaurant reinforces the belief that she will get unlimited chances (every night is a blank slate) to remake herself. At a certain point though, you begin to understand the effects of your actions, and realize that decisions can leave their mark on you forever.

The pain is what we know. It’s our barometer of reality. We never trust pleasure.”

When Tess comes in for an interview, she’s underqualified. It’s hard to believe she gets the job. Why does Howard hire her? Howard first recognizes her malleability, and secondly, her sensitivity. There’s something predatory about him observing that combination and wanting to keep her close to him. To mold her in a shape that suits him (or will serve him). At the same time, I believe Tess has agency in this relationship. She surprises Howard, impresses him, talks back to him. I don’t believe they are equals, but I’ve never totally seen her as a victim. In this instance, we reveal some of Howard’s background in psychology which allows him to puppet his servers so smoothly. This is an idea from Freud – he calls it “the death drive” – but it’s common in behavioral therapy today: we reenact our self-destructive tendencies because it gives us an illusion of control. For many people, we are most comfortable with chaos, codependency, and fear because we grew up with it. For all of Howard’s faults (of which there are many), when he says this to Tess, he’s intuiting something about her that men like Will or Jake are not mature enough to notice: her depth. That’s she obviously survived something, or that the ability to start over in a huge city where you don’t know anyone speaks to an uncommon level of bravery. He sees that she’s suffered before and treats her like an adult in that capacity.

It is a strange pressure to be across from a man who wants something that you don’t want to give. It’s like standing in a forceful current, which at first you think is not too strong, but the longer you stand, the more tired you become, the harder it is to stay upright.

Sweetbitter was written many years before the #metoo movement, before issues of consent and abuse toppled the careers of powerful men. I was interested in the way that men objectify, speak over, manipulate young women. Interested, perhaps, because I had experienced decades of it. How many times in my life had I made myself likeable, easy to digest, or kept quiet in fear of being perceived as difficult? How many times had I let inappropriate comments and touches go because I didn’t want to risk embarrassing the man who made them? Countless. The question I found myself asking in my thirties was: who benefitted from my smallness? My silence? It wasn’t me. Sweetbitter explores those themes: Tess is told by everyone who she is, how she should behave. People make assumptions instead of asking questions. And while Howard seems to be the more serious predator, men like Will, who will wear a woman down while acting the part of “the nice guy,” are just as insidious. Will really came alive in the Sweetbitter television show, thanks to the actor, Evan Jonigkeit. He never shied away from this character’s conflicts or darkness. He understood the subtlety of “nice guy coercion,” and even as Tess hurts him throughout the show, he’s never blameless. We spent a lot of time talking through the character and what we realized about Will is that he was going to make it out of restaurants. A lot of them are lifers, but you get the feeling that because of some essential naivete in him, he’s going to eventually leave the city, settle down, forget all these escapades. That’s not true for all the characters, especially Jake and Simone, who are stuck in their roles with each other and the restaurant.

“It’s an epidemic with women your age. A gross disparity between the way that they speak and the quality of thoughts that they’re having about the world. They are taught to express themselves in slang, in clichés, sarcasm—all of which is weak language. The superficiality of the language colors the experiences, rendering them disposable instead of assimilated. And then to top it all, you call yourselves ‘girls.’ ”

So much of Tess’s journey is about developing her voice. You’ll notice that she’s silent for most of the “Summer” season of the book. She observes, makes judgements, but mostly she’s trying to learn the codes of conduct, the language of the restaurant. Because it’s a first-person narrative, we know the depth of her feelings and thoughts. We know she’s having an intense experience. But to her co-workers, she’s quiet, maybe shy. As Simone encourages her to find her voice – asking her to express her tastes, her desires, ultimately her needs – Tess’s speaking voice changes. By the end, she’ll be able to say, No, or Yes, and mean it. But here in the book, she’s only just started to realize how precious words are. No one will take her seriously until she can use her voice authoritatively. Not only that, but Simone points out that she won’t be able to take herself seriously.

When you can’t see in front of you life is nothing but surprises. Looking back, there were truly so few of them.

This speaks to the experience of being young and being able to throw yourself into life in a way that one might consider reckless as they get older. Should Tess be surprised by how Jake ends up treating her? By who Simone turns out to be? It’s clear that they are troubled and damaged from the first time they show up on the page. But our experiences are determined by the stories we tell ourselves. What we want to believe. What we’re willfully blind to. And Tess – up until this point in the book – wants to believe that other people are acting towards her with their best intentions, though there is much evidence to the contrary.

“Aging is peculiar,” she said, moving a piece of parsnip around the plate with her fork. “I don’t think you should be lied to about it. You have a moment of relevancy—when the books, clothes, bars, technology—when everything is speaking directly to you, expressing you exactly. You move toward the edge of the circle and then you’re abruptly outside the circle. Now what to do with that? Do you stay, peering backward? Or do you walk away?”

Though kindred souls in many ways, Tess and Simone are sixteen years apart in age. I believe that before Tess came to the restaurant, Simone had been bored, numb. Tess and the project of educating and manipulating her, reawakens parts of Simone – her sense of humor, her maternal instincts – that she hasn’t felt in years. Simone also gets to experience all of Tess’s “firsts” vicariously. I happen to know for a fact that 38 is young but being close with Tess reminds Simone of how much time has gone by, how much of her life she’s already lived. She can’t get back that hopefulness that Tess has, because she knows too much. Simone is in the process of deciding whether she should hold onto aspects of her own wildness, or whether she should move into a different stage of her life. And what will that look like if marriage and children aren’t in her future? Will she stay in the restaurant forever? Tess raises all of these questions in her.

That was the morning I committed the first sin of love, which was to confuse beauty and a good sound track with knowledge.

Many of us have had this experience, and not just when we’re young. This was taken from my life, from a hazy, hungover morning in New York when I woke up with a man with whom I was deeply in love. I also knew we had no future together. We danced that morning to a record and I thought, if I was ten years younger, I would have given the beauty of this moment so much significance. I would have wanted to repeat it, chase it. I would have thought it meant intimacy, or commitment, not understanding that real intimacy often isn’t sexy or romantic, but hard work. I longed for my younger self in that moment. When I really believed that if the right song was playing, it meant things could work out.

Acknowledgments

A fun fact: The title comes from the Anne Carson translation of a Sappho poem I’ve used as an epigraph. Sappho is considered the first writer to call love “bittersweet.” As Carson was moving through a translation of Sappho’s work, she found that the word order in Greek was actually the opposite. It was “Sweetbitter.” It seems more appropriate that way, as it’s also the way that love works on us: the sweet first, then the bitter. I wrote most of Sweetbitter in graduate school, and every single time I workshopped pages, someone said, “I’m not sure about the title.” I knew it was right – it was an early lesson on trusting your instincts, and also remembering that not everything you hear in a writer’s workshop is accurate. A surprising change: The first draft of Sweetbitter had a different ending. Tess went to Howard’s office, awkwardly tried to seduce him, then got scared. She left his office and nothing physical had happened. One spring I was revising the book at an artist residency in the Catskills. I was almost totally alone in the mountains, it was April, there was still snow everywhere. It was late at night and I had taken a bath as a break from working. In the bath, I realized that Tess did sleep with Howard. And that she was active in it. That he manipulated her and abused his power, but he didn’t force her. I realized that the sex wasn’t nice. That it wasn’t going to be sex that you could brush off the next day or bounce back from with a joke. It was sex that bothers you for the rest of your life. In the bath, I thought, No! Not Tess! I don’t want to write it. But the writer in me knew how important it was that Tess take it too far. That she did not back off the ledge safely at the last second. No magical thinking, no comforting ending. It’s important because it’s real. Even if it’s unlikable, or repulsive, it’s in knowing our limits that real growth is achieved. I’m not sure that’s true for everyone, but I know it’s been true for me. Final Note About Stray Over the years, many people have assumed that I am Tess, that Sweetbitter is a thinly veiled memoir. There’s nothing you can really do to disabuse people of their ideas. Often their impressions of you have more to do with them than you. I had my own distinct story of my twenties, miles away from Tess (none of which included a Jake). But what Tess and I shared in common was a desire to start fresh in New York City. We both have a talent for ignoring our past and living deeply in the present moment. After twelve years in New York City – nearly all of that time in the restaurant industry – I decided to move back to Southern California, the place I was born and raised. The experience I had moving back – what I remembered, how I saw Los Angeles and the environment, who I had become, whether I was going to be able to transcend the drama and damage of my upbringing by two addicts – is the core of Stray. Though it’s quite different from Sweetbitter (less truffles, certainly), in a spiritual sense it’s a continuation of a story about a woman trying to make sense of who she will become. This time it’s the “going home” that undoes her. Both of my books are about boundaries, which will always be one of my obsessions. But with Stray, the story was too personal and exact, I decided to make it factual as well. In Sweetbitter, I didn’t worry over questions of fact and fiction – it’s a novel, I had total permission. In many ways, it would have been so much easier to make Stray a novel. But when you’re dealing with people you love, who are still alive, I believe you owe it to them – and the reader – to tell the truth as you remember it. Stray was extremely painful to write, but I wrote it to contribute to a conversation about addiction, recovery, love, and change. I wrote it because even though I often feel that I have no answers, it’s still my story to tell.