The XO Interview: Ali Rosen

The debut novelist on the illustrated covers, heroines hesitant to commit...and cookbooks!

I discovered Ali Rosen on Instagram and I followed her account for all the gorgeous and delicious food content. But then she started posting about…a romance novel! Specifically her debut novel, Recipe for Second Chances which, you guessed it, is a second chance romance. Alternatively set in NYC and a wedding in Italy, the novel features a passionate romance, a stellar cast of female friends and yes, recipes. We chatted about the inspo for her novel, those illustrated covers, writing without expectations and the joy of romance.

How did you first discover the romance genre? Which book was The One for you?

Unfortunately (for me!) I came to it quite late as a reader. I was always a romcom movie obsessive, but I had that deep-seated, ingrained relationship to reading where I always felt the pressure to be reading something perceived as intellectual (I know you wrote an entire book on this ridiculous cultural cognitive dissonance!). I read SO widely as a kid and teen but adulthood really warped my book choices. Then in 2018 I started going through some pretty gnarly fertility stuff and I just wanted to go back to being that girl who was inspired to read all day every day to escape. Someone recommended Josie Silver’s One Day in December and I was completely floored. How had I been missing that romance could be that well written, that complex, and that perfect? It really was The One that opened the door for me. And then I went down the rabbit hole of Jasmine Guillory, Helen Hoang, Sally Thorne, Christina Lauren et al and I’ve never looked back.

I know there’s a lot of chatter about romance covers changing, but as someone who had to be deprogrammed, I will say that illustrated covers did a lot for me to accept the life-altering potential of romance books.

You have an exciting career as a foodie with your own Emmy-nominated cooking show, Potluck with Ali and cookbooks like 15 Minute Meals. And your new book is…A Rom Com! What inspired you to write a novel? What inspired you to write this novel?

I think a writer is a writer is a writer – every bit of writing I’ve done for tv, articles or my cookbooks was honing that skillset. But at any particular moment, being a writer is really just about finding a subject you want to spend a hell of a lot of time with.  I’d never considered writing fiction, even as I started reading so much romance and felt so connected to the genre. But then the idea for this book wouldn’t leave me alone after a conversation I had with a friend in the spring of 2021. We’d both met our husbands young, and we started talking about whether people who were meant to be but had met too young would eventually find that person again. So this idea was sparked and I just began writing. Once I started I couldn’t stop. I think maybe I was so burned out from Covid and writing my last cookbook that I needed a creative escape without really needing anything tangible from it. But to my surprise I loved writing fiction so much more than I expected and now I can’t imagine ever stopping.

Your first novel is Recipe for Second Chances…and it’s a second chance romance set at a wedding in the Italian countryside with gorgeous descriptions of the food, the setting and the characters. We get dual timelines of Stella and Sam’s first romance in NYC, their dramatic breakup and then their reunion and romance at their friend’s wedding nine years later. In a nice twist, the heroine is the one who is resistant to committing. Can you tell us a little more about their romance?

This book will always be close to my heart because the past portion is very loosely based on the timeline of my own love story with my husband. We did meet the summer after our freshman year of college and I was reluctant to date him because we were so young and I went to school so far away. Unlike Stella and Samuel, we obviously did not break up, so their story has quite a few more twists and turns to make it narratively exciting! But people have always been so surprised to hear our story – that a man could be so convinced and committed at such a young age and that the woman might be the one to hesitate. As you point out, it’s not something you see often in romance, but I kind of love that the supposedly unrealistic piece of this romance is actually the one part based in reality. And then when you get to the present, the fantasy of falling in love at a blowout wedding in Italy is just the icing on the cake!

One thing I loved about the book was Stella’s strong group of female friends. They’re super present in her life in both timelines and they really help her with the breakthrough that gets her to happy ever after. How do these friendships play a role in Stella’s character and story?

Romance is at the heart of the book obviously, but friendship is what fuels Stella’s growth. We often see women at odds with each other across all kinds of fiction, but I think it’s much more common for female friendship to be one of the most important backbones of our lives. So it was very important to me to celebrate female friendship in this book and have the kind of supportive group that doesn’t pull punches. I deliberately wrote a heroine whose biggest obstacle is herself, because those are my favorite kinds of books to read, so she needed some good people in her corner to help her overcome what she needs to overcome!

Which is easier to write: a cookbook or a novel? (I’m only kind of joking!)

Well I think, funnily enough, the easiest thing to write is anything with no expectations! I really wrote this novel without telling anyone and without an initial goal of publishing it. So that was freeing in a way that my cookbooks have obviously never been.

But that being said, both are hard and both are wonderful. Cookbooks are like a mathematical equation that also has to convey emotion. It’s much more technical but it’s also significantly easier to break down into small pieces. Novels have much more freedom, but also need to be looked at as a singular piece to work.

I feel exceptionally lucky to have gotten to do both and I hope I get to keep doing both for a long time!

How do romance novels give you joy?

I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say they are among the greatest sources of joy in my life. Women who grow up with a love of reading are often told romance is a lesser genre, when in actuality it couldn’t be more important to our humanity. They help me escape stress; they fuel my imagination; they foster optimism; they make me a better wife, mother and friend by making communication, empathy and love always at the forefront of my mind. The quality of romance right now is unbelievable – I read around 100 books a year and I never find myself running out of incredible books to read. What a golden age of complex, interesting, diverse, deep and thought provoking romance we are living in! How lucky are we?!