Ladies First: A highly subjective, girls-only holiday book gift guide

A list of books (and newsletters) written by women whose work has touched this writer

Waiting for a red suit? Someone to pour the tea?

I usually don’t do listicles in this space. But I’m making an exception for books and women I think you should know about and support this holiday season.

This list is personal. It celebrates women whose work has touched me both personally and professionally. Whose work inspires, delights and challenges me to look at things in a different way. They are friends and colleagues.

So yeah, I’m playing favorites.

I’m also high-fiving some of the writers I’ve discovered through Substack over the past few months. Women whose work is new to me or has been on my periphery. Now I can’t wait for their stuff to show up in my inbox.

Spend your holiday coin on the work of these gals. You won’t be sorry.

You can get a taste of the work of these women (and even order directly) from this Bookshop list that I compiled. Bookshop is an online bookseller supporting indie bookstores around the country. As an affiliate, I get a 10 percent cut.

***Asterisk means this author writes on Substack, too.

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For a short time in 1998, Julia Watson* and I worked together at washingtonpost.com. We’d pile in her car and head to Eden Center, the Vietnamese strip mall (and culinary mecca) in Falls Church, Virginia. She delighted in showing me ingredients from all over the world. Insisted I bite into a Szechuan pepper. Her new title is BRUNO’S COOKBOOK, a collaboration with her husband Martin Walker, author of the BRUNO, CHIEF OF POLICE series.

Grace Young, whom I’ve written about here, has a long career as a culinary historian and award-winning cookbook author. Her books, including THE WISDOM OF THE CHINESE KITCHEN, are classics. Over the past three years, Grace has reinvented herself as an activist on behalf of America’s Chinatowns.

Stephanie Gailing* and I met on Twitter in 2008 when it was new and cool and you could make meaningful connections. At the time, she was working on her first of many astrology books. Her body of work, which always fuses astrology and personal wellness, including THE COMPLETE BOOK TO LIVING BY THE MOON. She also writes a monthly column for Well + Good.

Cathy Barrow and I go back to 2008 when she was blogging and I told her she better get a move on this food writing thing. She went on to write three cookbooks that cover the landscape of pie and preserving; the most recent goodie is BAGELS, SCHMEARS, AND A NICE PIECE OF FISH. These days we live two hours apart, so we get together a few times a year to share a meal or put up a few hundred pounds of tomatoes. She’s always got a project going — a knitted sweater in progress, a batch of celery salt made with dehydrated celery that she grew, homemade vermouth…

Sandra Gutierrez and I met at the beginning of our book-writing careers more than a decade ago. Now she’s one of this season’s cookbook stars with her opus, LATÍNISIMO. A walking encyclopedia, a scholar committed to her craft, una hermana de la cocina.

Earlier this year, I studied with Elissa Altman* to strengthen my core, I mean my memoir muscles. She’s got a trio of memoirs, including MOTHERLAND, passages of which I pick up randomly and re-read. Her new work, ON PERMISSION, comes out in 2024.

I wouldn’t have the meditation practice that I do today without the shepherding of Mel Salvatore-August. Her YOGA TO SUPPORT IMMUNITY is a practical, accessible guide for incorporating yoga and breath work into your daily routine.

Dorothy Kalins is a food publishing luminary. If this is news to you, go here to get schooled. Her memoir THE KITCHEN WHISPERERS lifts the veil on a life deliciously lived.

I met Michelle Li in Seattle where she was a reporter for KING-TV. Now based in St. Louis at KSDK-TV , Michelle turned a racist voicemail from a viewer into a teaching moment. She launched the Very Asian Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group celebrating the AAPI community. Her children’s book, A VERY ASIAN GUIDE TO KOREAN FOOD, came out in 2022.

The Kates: Lebo and McDermott*. Both Kates write about pie. Kate L is a poet and has a rich collection of essays called THE BOOK OF DIFFICULT FRUIT. In a former life, Kate McD was a classically trained pianist and teacher. She wrote her first cookbook, ART OF THE PIE, when she was sixty three. And she keeps on keeping on.

The Cynthias: Lair and Nims. Cynthia L had a big-deal teaching job at Bastyr University for a long time, and she was remarkable in that she showed how nutrition students needed to learn to cook if they were going to be effective nutritionists. These days she does improv theater. I told her recently that I took her SOURDOUGH ON THE RISE off the shelf to get reacquainted. Read it in bed, smiled wide, hearing her voice in my head. Cynthia N is a Northwest native and a master of single-subject cookbooks, like SHELLFISH AND GOURMET GAME NIGHT. No better person to teach you about Dungeness crab.

It’s Jeanne Sauvage who showed me that gluten-free baked goods didn’t have to taste like crap. Her first book baby, GLUTEN-FREE BAKING FOR THE HOLIDAYS will never go out of style.

SUBSTACKERIE

Cree LeFavour is documenting in real time her experiences cooking in Antarctica. As in the South Pole. Is that not wild and wonderful? I think I’m kind of envious, but I open her updated posts like a present under the tree.

Kim Foster, whose memoir METH LUNCHES is on my wish list, writes about family, food and hard things (kinda like this Kim).

Susie Middleton, a big-deal food editor in a former life with a bunch of cookbooks to her name, gets real about living in sobriety. Shaken, not stirred, with nature.

Dr. Wendy Nettifee blends astrology with somatics and the things we cannot always see. It’s real, it’s weird, it’s really well written.

Brooke Warner is a publishing executive who writes honestly about the publishing industry. In recent months, she created this cool co-writing thing she calls SHOW UP & WRITE, as way to keep her accountable on her own memoir and build community.

My writing partner and former cubicle mate Alexa Beattie writes about hard things. She always has a zinger of a line, one that seems off key, but that’s exactly as she intended.

I’m just learning about Jeannine Ouellette and her memoir THE PART THAT BURNS and her writing workshops and and and….