Author drinks it all in while promoting ‘Sweetbitter’

Stephanie Danler of Brooklyn, N.Y., has spent many of her formative years working in the restaurant industry.

'I was really happy in restaurants,” she said of her work. 'I was extremely fulfilled professionally, and I have worked in every position. I started when I was 15 years old and at the point of applying to graduate school I was 29 and I stayed in the industry after that.”

Danler also has spent most of her life aspiring to be an author.

'I have always wanted to be a writer and have been writing since I was old enough to read,” she said. 'I'm a reader first, but around 8 or 9 years old I began consciously crafting my own stories and moving away from mimicking the stories I like to relying on my own imagination.”

For most of the years that Danler was working as a restaurateur, however, writing took a back seat - until recently.

'I was managing a restaurant and getting ready to open a wine store with my name on the lease and it was like the pinnacle of this decade of restaurant work, but I had this low-level heaviness that I couldn't shake off,” she said. 'It was because I had this idea for a novel that was a female coming-of-age story set in this world I knew so intimately and found so fascinating and punishing and romantic. I was turning 30, and I thought if I don't do this now I'll never write it. My whole life felt like it was taking on permanence by the minute. That was the impetus to apply to school. It was a very small step.”

Danler applied to graduate school at the New School in New York and got accepted. While enrolled, she took her initial story idea and turned it into her debut novel, 'Sweetbitter.”

'It really was one step at a time,” she said, noting that she was going to school for her master's in creative writing and working on the book while still working two restaurant jobs.

'The first thing I wrote was the first sentence of ‘Sweetbitter' and many of the scenes and fragments of dialogue were there. I had a map of this book, and I knew it was something. And I had the voice of Tess (the main character), a very young, melancholy, romantically inclined, hyper present tense voice. When I wrote those first 25 pages I saw the entire book in my mind and knew that if I just kept writing, 50 pages at a time, I could get to the last sentence.”

She did and 'Sweetbitter” was received with much acclaim as a debut work, including being selected as an NPR Best Book of 2016.

'I would say that ‘Sweetbitter' is working with and against a lot of boy books,” said Danler who kept 'Bright Lights, Big City,” 'The Great Gatsby” and 'Portrait of a Lady” in mind while writing. 'In ‘Portrait of a Lady' Henry James gave us arguably the greatest heroine, but because it was written by a man, he couldn't inhabit her anxieties or get close to her experience,” she said.

The novel follows protagonist Tess who arrives in New York City and finds a job as a 'backwaiter” in a glitzy Manhattan restaurant.

'I was thinking a lot about restaurant books that portrayed this sort of masculine, testosterone-driven world that we tend of think of,” she added. 'That was not the restaurant world I had been inhabiting. I had a desire to rewrite these stories and at the same time expose this moment of a women's life of being 22 and having autonomy for the first time.”

'It makes for a very dramatic time in most people's life as they are figuring out the balance between responsibility and consequence,” she said. 'So I set out to explore this period of time and the process of becoming and then to show this really sensual, delicate side of restaurants that's less about hands flying at your head. There's lot of chaos, drugs and sex because that is actually the restaurant industry, but there's also the polishing of glasses and the way the light changes in the bar and the ballet of movement throughout the course of dinner service that I wasn't seeing in literature.”

Danler will be reading from 'Sweetbitter” on Monday night at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City as part of a national book tour with the release of the paperback edition.

'Meeting readers is so surreal and I think I'm in shock every time,” she said. 'It's impossible to process when someone comes up to you and tells you how important your book is.”

She said she enjoys letting the audience drive the conversation at her bookstore events.

'I love to let the crowd to dictate what we talk about,” she said, noting that she makes sure to address the less glamorous parts of what it takes to make a book come together, share brass tacks information with aspiring writers and evade questions from fans wanting to know why she made certain choices while writing 'Sweetbitter.”

'Sometimes people even ask me about restaurants, and I just love to be in conversation with my audience, whether it's two people or 250 people.”

Danler, who continues to write non-fiction and personal essays as her current travel schedule will allow, continues to grow her love for bookstores as well.

'Meting booksellers is the joy of this, a perk I go home with,” she added. 'I've spent most of my life in independent bookstores and that is a huge part of what formed me as a reader/writer/human. I love seeing the country that way.”

BOOK READING

What: Stephanie Danler will read from her novel, 'Sweetbitter”

When: 7 p.m. Monday

Where: Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City

Cost: Free