On this episode of Five Rules for the Good Life, I sit down with my friend and colleague, Andrew Friedman, author, podcaster, and one of my favorite writers working in food today. We dig into his Five Rules for Living an Artist’s Life, from trusting your gut to trusting the process, and why sometimes the hardest part is just having the confidence to call yourself an artist in the first place. Whether you’ve got a blank page, a hot stove, or a guitar in hand, this episode is a reminder that finding your voice is a lifelong process—and it’s worth every step.
This one hit close to home. I’ve spent a career in creative work—producing, directing, writing—but for whatever reason, I’ve always hesitated to use the word “artist” when talking about myself. Hearing Andrew talk about permitting yourself to own that title, even if only internally, was a real shift. This episode isn’t just about the craft. It’s about belief. Belief in your instincts, your process, your weird ideas, and your voice—even if it’s still forming. And maybe, just maybe, it gave me the nudge I needed to start saying it out loud.
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Transcription
Hello and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life. I'm your host, Darin Bresnitz. Today, I am so excited to be sitting down with my friend and colleague, writer and author, Andrew Friedman.
He has written some of my favorite books about the culinary world, including Chefs, Drugs, and Rock and Roll, and The Dish, which is a deep dive into how one plate of food can represent the entire industry. I also enjoy his weekly podcast, Andrew Talks to Chefs, where he sits down and chats with some of the greatest voices and minds of the food scene. He joins me today to share his five rules for living an artist's life, and he gets into finding the right balance between working and living, what it really means to trust your gut, and the all-important north star, which is finding your voice.
So let's get into the rules. Andrew, it is always a pleasure to see you and to chat with you. I feel like we've gotten to have a lot of conversations this year, and it just makes me so happy.
I feel the same way, and it was all kind of happenstance, right? It all kind of started when we ran into each other at the big benefit for the LA Fires. And who says there was no benefits for my house burning down? A small price to pay. A small price to pay.
I'm so excited to see you today to chat about your career in creative work and being an author and everything that's fallen under that umbrella. And before we get to the latter stuff, I want to talk about the earlier days. Do you remember the first time you did any sort of creative work? I don't know that it was that unusual, but I do remember little assignments, like in elementary school.
I had done this kind of illustrated story. There was this whole civilization, like in caves, like underground. And I remember the teacher wrote, what an imagination.
And I was really young when I did it. Yes. There's this crazy memory, and I swear to God, it's true.
The Miami News, which used to be the Miami afternoon newspaper, and every year they had a scary story contest at Halloween. And I wrote the winning entry for my age category in about half an hour. I had an idea, and I banged it out, and I mailed it in.
Love it. But I didn't know I had won until I went to a newsstand after school that day, bought a copy of the paper, and opened it up, and there was my story. And that was a big moment.
Having those moments, having those early creative wins are so important, because it shows you that there can be success in doing this type of work, or having an idea and turning something real. And in addition to that, having someone support that creative work, whether it's a family member or a teacher. If you don't have that, good luck trying to get any sort of creative work done in your life.
Yeah. Who was that in your life that supported you in your early endeavors? When it came to the mechanics and the craft of writing, there were teachers all the way back to elementary school who told me what a good writer I was. A woman named Eleanor Bachman at my elementary school.
Several others. When I was at Columbia, undergraduate as an English major, there was a professor named Victoria Silver. I remember sitting in her office, and she was one of many teachers who felt like I wasn't really applying myself.
And I still remember this sentence. She said to me, she said, you are incapable of writing an unintelligent sentence. The place where I was constantly for 10 years of my education, getting reinforcement was on the writing front.
Getting this reinforcement and having all this support throughout your childhood and into college, when did you realize that you were actually making a go of it professionally? What was the tipping point? At the end of my freshman year, I read The Great Gatsby on a flight home. And that's when I decided, I'm not kidding, sounds overly romanticized, but that's when I decided I wanted to be a writer. That book made me want to see if I could make a go of doing prose fiction, actual narrative fiction, which I haven't yet managed to do.
But I also haven't really pursued that beyond short stories in college. From that initial thought after reading Great Gatsby to where you are today, you've lived quite a life and put together quite a portfolio. So I'm excited for you to share your five rules for living an artist's life.
And the very first rule you have is interesting because it's about the actual naming of that life itself. What is your rule number one? My first rule is don't be afraid to call yourself an artist, even if only internally. I think if you ask 10 different people to define what makes somebody an artist, you might get 10 different answers.
But I do think if you are trying to do something that has meaning, something that might affect other people, that might provoke an emotional or an intellectual response. And to you, that is art. Declare that for yourself, to own that, to kind of commit to that level of ambition and intent, I think is something that one should not apologize for and one should put out there.
And if you don't want to put it out to the world, at least in your own mind, that's an important thing to know for your own self and for your work and for how you go about your life. But I do think that's an important distinction. Putting work out there is such an important part of living the artist's life and trusting your gut.
What's your rule number two? My second rule is to go with your instinct, no matter how weird or idiosyncratic it might seem. And all I mean by that is I worked for a film producer for four or five years right after college. I remember we had a new intern starting one day and he was kind of giving her a briefing.
They were talking about reading screenplays. And he was saying, not just in reading screenplays, but when you go to movies or when you read books, just be attuned to what pleases you. And don't worry about, is it high or low? Is it sophisticated or sophomoric? Just figure out what floats your boat.
I put out my third solo nonfiction book about a year and a half ago. And it's the first book where I really feel like I homed in on my voice. What is my real voice? And it's because I stopped trying to kind of put on airs and I let myself sound the way in a full length book that I sound in my emails or that I sound in blog posts where I used to feed my blog more often.
There's some irreverent humor and I got the best reviews that I'd gotten, but I've stopped trying to be anyone but me. And I think for better or for worse, I'm writing stuff that's more true to myself. A lot of what I thought artists did for a living was inspired by the movies that I watched as a kid.
And their lives consisted mainly of long martini lunches, gallivanting around New York City, dinner parties that lasted deep into the night, and most of the creation of art was done off screen. And that the emphasis of their work-life balance was definitely on the life part. Your third rule challenges that perception I had.
What is your rule number three? My third rule is to ignore the zeitgeist and specifically all the talk in the last several years about balance. Work-life balance is certainly healthy. I do also think that it can be just downright incompatible with an artistic ambition.
Years ago, Lin-Manuel Miranda, before anyone had heard of him, tweeted something that said Lin-Manuel Miranda dot dot dot is working on Founding Fathers on Saturday night. And years later he retweeted it. It was a little message above it that basically said, you will have to say no to some things to say yes to work.
It will be worth it. Of course. And of course, Founding Fathers eventually got renamed.
It was Hamilton. And I just moved back to New York City two and a half years ago from suburbia. And my kids are in college now and I could be out every, especially doing what I do for a living.
I could be out every night of the week. Absolutely. And if I showed you my calendar on my iPhone right now, it's almost all white because I have really backed off on plans.
I will not have lunch on any day except Friday. And I just want to be here working on stuff. That's awesome.
If you want to be doing something that rises to a certain level, you're not entirely in control of when the best of that is going to be available to you. I still live by this notion of sometimes the muse descends. And when that happens, I want to be available for that.
Unless you get struck by inspiration like you did for your scary story, you're going to have to make that time to sit down and write. Exactly. On the other side of the work-life balance coin is a question that every artist must ask themself and ties directly into your rule number four.
Well, my fourth rule goes back to myself and every other English major I spent time with when I was in college, was fascinated by. And the American poet, Wallace Stevens, who was one of the great poets of the 20th century, who was also for his entire adult life, the vice president of a bank. But my only point here is everybody needs to come to terms with, if you're not among the super talented and a little bit lucky people who can make a really good living as a writer, at some point need to reckon with, are you willing to be a starving artist because of this idea you have that that is what you're going to do with your life? Or is the art an end in itself? Can you be satisfied with simply producing it, whether for yourself or for a limited number of people out there, or selling it piecemeal to literary magazines or gigging on the weekend with your band or whatever it is? And do you, at the same time, have just a certain need for creature comforts, for financial security? No, I'm being totally serious.
Do you have a family? No, I totally get it. Yeah. Do you have a family? Most things we're talking about, whether it's composing, performing, writing, painting, whatever it is, most of those things can happen on your own, shared with a limited audience.
And you might want to consider having a job, if not a career, in a non-artistic realm that will just set you up to lead a more comfortable life and be able to take vacations and go to a nice restaurant for your birthday and all these things. I do think that is something worth considering if you haven't turned into John Grisham by the time you're 35. Your last rule really resonated with me because I remember, maybe not the exact date, but the exact time in my life when there was the before moment and the after moment.
What is your fifth rule? My fifth rule is to find your voice. I'll put quotes around the word voice. It could be an artistic style.
It could be a culinary style, whatever your medium is. But to find your voice and to keep finding and honing it. This kind of dovetails with something I said a few minutes ago.
There's a writer named Tom Jones, T-H-O-M Jones. He wrote a great collection of short stories called The Pugilist at Rest. And somewhere in the introduction to that book, he talks about, I think he had been a high school janitor at one point.
And somewhere in the intro, he says something about, I didn't realize how long the journey to the interior would be. And I really do believe this. I think this is something a lot of us have as kids and a cruel society has trained it out of us.
But this idea of just being who you are. Here I am, I've been making a living as a writer for 25 years, maybe. And I'm just finding that gear for myself.
But I feel like it would have been there when I was 10. You got covered up and then you got to peel it back like layers of paint. Everyone's always telling you what you can't do, right? Book editors don't want to buy a certain idea.
No one wants anything that's too outside the box. You have to constantly be resistant to that headwind. Andrew, if people want to read any work, buy any of your books, hear about your next book coming up, where can they go? How can they see all the work you've done as an artist? The easiest thing would probably just go to the website for my podcast, which has a page devoted to all the books I've written and collaborated on and has a full bio of me.
And that is andrewtalkstochefs.com. And then my main Instagram feed is toquelanddandrew, that's T-O-Q-U-E. Congratulations on everything. Good luck with the next writing endeavor.
And hopefully I'll get to see you in person again real soon. Thank you, Darin. Thanks for having me on.