Emily Gould and I make Szechuan chicken and discuss THERE’S A ROAD TO EVERYWHERE on her excellent show Cooking the Books. About an hour before this Emily made Szechuan green beans with Sigrid Nunez. It was a wild coincidence. Afterward we (Emily and Andrew and Val, the CTB producer and director, respectively) all sat around eating the food (including Sigrid’s leftovers) and shooting the breeze. I drank three beers and got strangely high (in the John Cheever sense of the word) I think because I was so nervous to be on the show. Along those lines, I can’t quite bring myself to watch the clip. I hate virtually every picture I see of myself, and then to be moving and talking and even eating … I don’t know. Maybe it’s a reverse form of narcissism or something. I suppose I could try to find out but there’s only so much stuff you can bring up in therapy, there’s only so much time. It’s like right when you start talking your therapist is like, We have to stop. Anyway I had a lot of fun doing this. It was shot on 2/13/11. 

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