I smiled at the sound of my sister’s voice. In the last few weeks, my circle had shattered. The friends I laughed and bickered and shared everything with had moved away. My roommate Ashmeeta had followed a job to Boston. My pal Rachel had followed a boyfriend to Portland. But I could always count on Meg.

“Working.”

“I thought you were off today,” Meg said.

A siren whooped in the distance. “From the restaurant, yeah. I’m writing.”

“Oh, your blog.” I could hear one of the twins—two-year-old Daisy, or maybe that was DJ—chanting in the background: “Mommy. Ma. Mamamama.” “How’s it going?”

I smiled. “Good.”

Okay, not Julie & Julia or Smitten Kitchen good. Mine was not a success story. Or an interesting story of failure, like the gritty novels admired by my faculty advisor, where the small-town girl falls into a life of drugs and prostitution. Or even a Hallmark screenplay, where the heroine goes home to embrace her small-town roots and marry her high school sweetheart, finding love and purpose along the way. There was no big book advance, no movie deal, no guest appearance on the Food Network in my immediate future. Nope. The blog was more a fallback position than the fulfillment of my Life Plan. But I was slowly picking up readers. Instagram followers. E-mail subscribers. Even a few advertisers, which helped pay the rent since I’d been laid off from the newspaper. “Last hired, first fired,” my editor had explained regretfully when he let me go.

My dismissal had come as a shock. Yeah, yeah, I knew all about the dismal decline of print journalism. But I was supposed to be the smart one. The successful one. Certainly back when I wrote the school play and edited the school paper, graduating summa cum laude from the University of North Carolina and earning an MFA from NYU, I never imagined a future as an anonymous food blogger.

But I was determined to make this work. I earned a little money as a prep cook. The experience—and the insider’s view of a top restaurant kitchen—were great. I hadn’t given up my dream, I explained to my father on my last visit home. After all, I was still writing, getting comments (reader feedback!) on a daily basis. The book deal would come. After, you know, I scraped together a book. I just had to survive until then.

“I tested a new recipe yesterday,” I said. “For mac and cheese. Did you see it?”

“On your blog?”

“Yeah.”

“No. I mean, not yet. Sorry,” Meg said. “No, Daisy, that’s DJ’s cup. This is your cup.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

“It’s just I’ve been so busy with the twins . . .”

“I understand,” I said.

And I did. Why should my sister read about my life when we talked almost every day? No one back home in Bunyan followed my blog. They went out for barbecue or home for Sunday dinner. They weren’t interested in the restaurant scene in New York City. Or in the people who ate there. Or in the person I’d become. Fortunately for me, New Yorkers searched for “places to eat” almost as frequently as “the Mets” or “rent-controlled apartments.”