S.E. Boyd is actually three people. Kevin Alexander, Joe Keohane, and Alessandra Lusardi are all journalists who between them have written for Esquire, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. Alexander also has a James Beard Award for food writing, which the other two are reportedly sick of hearing about. They decided to write a novel together, which on paper sounds like a terrible idea. Novels by committee usually read like novels by committee.
Their novel is called The Lemon and it came out in 2022. A TV food personality, someone in the Bourdain mould, dies at the opening of a Hamptons restaurant. Everyone who was anyone in the food world was there that night and the book is essentially about what they all did next. Some of them mourned. Most of them saw an opportunity. I did not expect a satire about celebrity chefs to make me emotional but it did.
“We wanted to write a book that was a love letter to food culture and a poison-pen letter to everything around it.”
It won the Thurber Prize for American Humor, which is one of the bigger literary awards in the US for comic writing. Winning it with a debut novel written by three people is the kind of thing that should not work but did.
Quick facts
- Actually three people: Kevin Alexander, Joe Keohane, Alessandra Lusardi
- Won the Thurber Prize for American Humor
- Credits include Esquire, The Atlantic, The New Yorker
- Alexander has a James Beard Award for food writing
- Debut: The Lemon (2022)
The voice is sharp, the restaurant world is rendered with insider accuracy, and the satire lands because the authors clearly love the thing they are making fun of. If you have ever watched a food documentary and felt uneasy about the gap between the performance and the person, this is the novel for you.
The Lemon (2022)