Maria Yagoda will be reading at Difficult to Name Saturday, Feb. 10
Your story about eating alone at the Times Square Olive Garden for ten days in a row was one of my favorite pieces of last year. Could you describe the process through coming up with that idea to seeing it published?
Thank you! The really sick thing about that Olive Garden piece is that no one wanted me to do it or suggested I do it; I just got this idea in my head that it would be useful somehow to eat breadsticks, oversalted pasta and bottomless Diet Coke for ten days in a row, just by myself -- no one bothering me, just relaxing my face and secretly taking off my shoes underneath the table. Of course, the big reveal is that *I* would bother me, but the journey was valuable, I think, even though my body still hasn't recovered, months later. Publishing that piece was wild. I'm still shocked no one stopped me.
You graduated from Yale, which is awesome. What's your favorite restaurant in New Haven?
New Haven is amazing! A fantastic food city. My favorite restaurant - for sentimental reasons, and because Frank always hooks me up with sake bombs - is Miya's, a really dope sustainable sushi place where my dog once got in a fight with Parker Posey's dog. For real.
What can people expect from your reading?
A pretty deadpan delivery. One kind of off-putting thing about me is that I don't laugh.