hostess diaries

how to write a book

Hi!

My novel, Ghost Fish, came out last August, in the fading days of summer when everything was hot-sticky and our flip-flops were flattened from the zillion walks to Ralph’s Ice. It came out in the “one last” season, as in one last beach trip, one last Aperol spritz. I was grateful: it is a SUMMER BOOK in the Emily Sundberg sense of the word (meant to be read as near to a body of water and/or your best friend as possible).

It was a book I wrote, mostly, while at the beach. I rented a small flat in Marseille in August of 2022, unaware that the French do not air condition. Every morning I would wake up and write until lunchtime, then walk thirty minutes to the pebbley beach where I would read and float on my back in the Mediterranean and eat peaches and marvel at my luck. I finished the first draft of my first novel there, sweaty and deliciously alone.

Unfortunately I am not a princess nor the heiress to a small fortune. I was able to afford this month off because, in addition to having four roommates in a shitty apartment, I worked a lot. I worked like a dog because I wanted, so badly, a straight shot of time, expansive and all mine, to devote to writing. I wanted to find out what happened if I lived exactly how I wanted: like a monk. I wanted to swim in the ocean and eat fish out of tins and wake up as early as I liked. So, among other things, I got a job as a hostess at a restaurant in a West Village hotel, a restaurant I applied to because it was on the same block as a music studio with a memorable name I recognized from Patti Smith’s memoir.

Did I enjoy the job? I want to say yes, but the truth is that I don’t like staying up late and I have a horrible memory so I was often grumpy and panicked. It was busy for about fifteen minutes each shift, and then tedious. Still it somehow paid more than any other restaurant gig I’d ever had, and after we stopped checking vaccine cards (remember that?) I got the sense that the most important part of my job was to dress prettily and look as young as possible. I started to feel like I was losing my mind, standing for hours behind the host stand. A busy night meant 2-5 reservations; mostly people wanted to sit in the lobby by the fireplace, and usually they couldn’t because the good seats were supposed to be reserved for hotel guests. Omg, do you see what I mean? At a certain point it became mind-numbingly impossible to care about who got to sit where. Unless cash was involved.

I was also in graduate school and for the first time in my life, meeting people who took writing seriously, who were talented and knew how to make casual conversation about Russian novelists. I was intimidated and a little ashamed I worked so much compared to most of my new friends who either didn’t have jobs or already had titles that seemed very fancy and important. I alchemized that misplaced shame into a petty determination to bend my job into something interesting, or at the very least, something I could use.

Since I was allowed to have a book and my phone and something to write with at the host stand, I started taking notes. I was very much inspired by Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter.

At first I just wrote down the sometimes deranged, sometimes mundane things I overheard whilst stationed at my post but then I started to feel like a piece of furniture. People would say such insane things—the table nearest to the host stand was maybe two feet away—that I started to feel the urge to scream, I AM STANDING RIGHT HERE! I CAN HEAR YOU! I would walk down to the staff bathroom in the bowels of the hotel and the person looking back at me in the hazy mirror would not seem real.

staff bathroom, 2021, personality extinguished by men in gucci loafers and no socks…

Time passed slowly. One day I clocked in and found I was no longer the new girl, thus an active participant in the ecosystem of the restaurant, sort-of clued into the gossip. Occasionally a minor celebrity¹ would come in or someone would lock themselves in the bathroom to shoot up. Things were happening and I started recording those too, at least for awhile. For a few months—I so wish I’d kept at it longer!—I wrote a diary of sorts. Everything is copy became a bet I made with myself at the beginning of each shift. And after a class in which I received devastating feedback from a professor on the novel I was certain would be my first book, I decided I’d shelve it and instead become the Anthony Bourdain of hostesses². After all, I was already taking notes. I started working on a novel that centered on a restaurant in Manhattan. Not quite mine, but inspired by, with the idea that the restaurant itself would be the protagonist of the book. I’d make the walls talk. Within the walls, one of the characters was a young woman named Alison who’d just moved to New York. She was grieving, making bad decisions, always lost. The more I wrote, the more I became fixated on her. I forgot I was supposed to be authoring the first great “hostess book” (and thank god for that—if this book is ever written it will be written by Roya Shanks³). The restaurant remained part of the story but as I worked my shifts, then left for France, then moved to Brooklyn, swapping my hostess job for one in a carpeted office while beginning the long process of wrangling that messy draft into a novel, I forgot about all of those notes I’d taken; all I wanted to do was tell Alison’s story. I didn’t want to stay in the restaurant, I wanted to go to the sea. And that’s what became my first book, a novel called Ghost Fish that’s about grief and summertime and confusing relationships and making out with the wrong person at Joyface and loneliness and Key West.

Anyway, this is a long way to say that I’m very excited that this novel is entering its first full summer in the world. It was written in the summer, about a summer, for those who like me are both loneliest and most alive in the summer. I want you to take this book to the beach and dog ear it to death. I want it to be water-stained and sandy, so fucked up that you apologize when you pull it out of your tote bag, a little greasy from being handled with sunscreened fingers, and pass it to your friend to borrow.

Earlier this month I was looking for something else on my computer and found the google doc where I’d saved all my notes. It almost made me miss hostessing. And in case you want a look at the source material⁴ before committing to the whole book, I thought I might share my notes, my diary from those long nights of “Yesofcourse,” and “How many?” and “Shots?” and “Make me an espresso?” and “Holy fucking shit, that guy making out with that girl at L3 was here with his wife yesterday.”

If you DO take a peek, you must first pinky swear that this summer you will check out my book from the library, you will submerge yourself in a body of water, you will wear sunscreen.

Love you!

Stuart

1. Or not so minor—I will never forget my manager beckoning me to the iPad with the Open Table app and pointing to the name Elvis Costello next to a 5:45 PM dinner reservation. Surely THE Elvis Costello wouldn’t make a dinner res under his own name? We were wrong!

2. To have the confidence of my 26 year old self…I miss her!

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/style/who-is-hostess-at-the-odeon.html

4. I have redacted some names because I’m not a snitch