Lu Trusdale’s agent, Abigail Knowles, was at first worried and disappointed when she learned that Dinner by Dad’s creator was a woman. “I don’t know, though,” she said. “You know what, let me talk to my boss.” She spoke more quietly into the phone, like she was the one with the secret. “I’m actually really quite low down here. I’m just starting out. Huxley has the real power. I’ll have to talk to him.”

Forty-five minutes later she called back. “Huxley reminded me about Elena Ferrante,” she said. “Nobody knew who she was for the longest time but that didn’t keep those books from selling bazillions of copies.” It was a basic tenet of human nature, Huxley had reminded Abigail, that people loved secrets and scandal more than they loved almost anything else. “In fact, he said the mystique was partly why the Ferrante books sold so well. Also they were brilliant. But anyway, Huxley says we organize a PR campaign around the idea of this mystery dad. We’ll keep with the charcoal drawings. Once you get really big, we’ll do a reveal.”

Abigail gave Lu the names of a couple of PR people who might be interested in helping. “The first one is pricey,” she said. “But we’ve had a few authors who have used her, and she’s supposed to be the best. Her name is— Hang on, I’m just looking it up. Okay, here it is. Do you have a pen? Shelly Salazar.”

It took a long time for the Trusdales to find a good nanny. Sebastian bit the first two, and Chase scared away the next one when he put the pet hamster in her sneaker. When they were in between nannies Lu had to call on Nancy’s help, which Nancy managed to offer both willingly and judgmentally. Sebastian’s first trip to the emergency room happened when Lu was in New York, meeting with the designer for her cookbook. Chase’s soccer playoff game was the same day she had a photo shoot scheduled with three other up-and-coming food bloggers for the New York Times to be used as part of the big reveal. Chase scored, and he looked immediately for Lu, and Lu wasn’t there. Lu missed Sebastian’s school play when she was speaking at Sapor! in San Francisco.

Sometimes Lu had to speak directly to herself in the mirror, out loud. She had to say, You. Wanted. This. Now go and get it. Testing recipes for a cookbook was painstaking and time-consuming, and she had to rent industrial kitchen space and hire an assistant to do it, because it was too difficult and disruptive at home. It was a lot of work to keep up the blog and at the same time manage advertisers and affiliate sponsors without letting them take over. As Dinner by Dad’s visibility increased, so did Lu’s (and Leo’s) responsibilities. The social media alone sometimes felt like a full-time job. The money helped, of course, although it didn’t do all the heavy lifting, because money never did. There were rocky days in the marriage and there were smooth days, but overall there were far more smooth than rocky. When Lu was in the thick of it, cooking, writing, tweeting, thinking, learning, responding to readers’ comments and queries, it felt like she was on the only correct path, and that it was straight and sure.