“No one seems to want to admit the truth: food is work, and then you shit it out.” So goes the trope-busting in Samuel Ashworth’s debut novel, The Death and Life of August Sweeney. Marketed as The Bear meets Bones, the novel aims to usurp both shows in terms of precision and grit. It opens with the final autopsy report of its titular character, August Sweeney, a larger-than-life chef whose career fluctuated between iconic and infamous. 

The procedure is conducted—and narrated—by Dr. Maya Zhu, the strict, esteemed autopsist tasked with pathologizing the failings of August’s body, as demanded by his final will and testament. For much of the novel, why August chose her specifically is a mystery, but she is captivated by him regardless, like a moth drawn to flame. 

By Dr. Maya Zhu’s hand, the evidence of all August’s 52 years are laid out beside him, organ by organ, on a dissection table. She reads his entrails like tea leaves to understand his past and her future. Together, these characters converge across the boundary of death to ask: what does it mean to seek power? And, once you’ve got it, what the hell do you do with it?

Dodging recent blights of snow and sickness across D.C., Ashworth and I spoke virtually about the worlds of food, autopsy, and writing—none as disparate as they seem.

Jessika Bouvier: I loved how much the novel toed the line between disgusting and delicious at all times. So many organs! We see this with Nose to Tail, one of August’s food shows (“He’d teach [celebrity chefs] to eat things like knuckle and duck tongue.”) We see this dichotomy with Dr. Maya Zhu, too, especially in the beginning—she is so committed to instill a sense of fear and disgust in the medical students shadowing her in the autopsy lab.

Beginning the novel, I couldn’t fathom how you would make the worlds of food and death intertwine; by the end, they were so connected that I couldn’t remember ever thinking of them as separate. What was the inciting incident that made you bring these two worlds together in fiction? Why, for you, are they inextricably linked?

Samuel Ashworth: From the beginning, this was always going to be a book of the body—I knew I wanted to tell a person’s life story through their autopsy.  I felt really strongly that literature hadn’t produced what I would call a true book of the body, one where the human body was not only its subject, but its structure, its governor, its binding constraint. 

The character of Dr. Maya Zhu actually pulled together quickly, but she was a medical student in her original conception. The idea was that I would take her through the first semester of gross anatomy, which is the first class everyone does in medical school. You have 40-odd cadavers embalmed in a room. You learn anatomy by taking them apart piece by piece, and that was going to be the structure of the story. I had a friend who was in medical school down in Philadelphia, so I drove down there; one night, she took me to her gross anatomy lab. I had not seen a dead body before—like, I’m Jewish, We don’t do open caskets. Suddenly I’m in a room with 40 dead bodies, and one of the things I immediately noticed was that I was wildly hungry. Not in a ‘I haven’t eaten’ way, but in a, I must eat food way. 

It turns out this happens a lot. My friend said it happened all the time. I think there were two reasons for  it: the nice, psychological comforting thing about how, in the presence of death, our bodies seek nourishment in order to make ourselves feel alive. But then there’s what I think is the actual reason, which is that the body preserved looks a lot like cured meat. You know, all life is spurred by its appetite, and these characters are creatures of appetite. That’s what this book is really about. So once I had that detail, I knew that the body on the table [in the novel] had to be a chef. And I wanted to make sure that chef would be the most interesting body he could possibly be, because he had to be somebody striking in order to get Dr. Maya Zhu’s attention. 

JB: Although the storylines converge further into the novel, at first, these read like two different experiences. They also happen at drastically different paces: we read the moment of August’s birth up until his death, while Dr. Maya Zhu is mostly tethered to a single day, narrating as she performs August’s autopsy—52 years versus roughly 15 hours. 

Was it always envisioned with these time constraints in mind? Was it a challenge to balance the level of interiority and background of both characters within this framework? 

SA: Part of what was hard about that was they were constantly jockeying for the controller, and that was kind of the fun of it. That original image of a semester of gross anatomy lasted for a while, until I finally realized what I wanted was Maya to be a borderline savant. She’s brilliant; she can read a body like you and I read a text. The problem is even the most gifted medical student can’t do what I need; they might be able to name the body parts, but they can’t say what they do. It’s not credible. Once I realized that, I knew I needed to get into a proper autopsy lab. I got access to an autopsy lab in Pittsburgh for two weeks. I had written some chapters of Maya before that point—quite a few—and the minute I walked into that lab, I knew every word was worthless. I had been basing my images off of autopsies I’d seen on television, and every single thing television has taught [us] about the autopsy is spectacularly wrong.

Once I knew what I was doing, the format came very naturally, because an autopsy only lasts so long. You can’t drag it on for a week. In fact, the autopsy of August isn’t finished at the end of the book, which is kind of my favorite thing about it. That was a huge gift for me because I have a little pocket obsession with real time. I’m a Ulysses person at heart. When you have a story that takes place in the course of a day, you have to make that day exciting. 

JB: There are so many side characters in the novel. I had a really soft spot for Timo, August’s first proper boss. 

SA: (affectionately) Ah, Timo Pruno. 

JB: I used to work front of house and he reminded me a bit of my first manager. There’s a moment between them, after August gets promoted to head chef at Timo’s, where Timo corrects August’s understanding of what it means to be a boss. A boss works for their employees, not the other way around. 

It was doubly heartbreaking when, eventually, August climbs his way up the food chain and leaves Timo’s. For a long time he avoids ever returning; it felt indicative of how he struggles to learn and exert leadership and accountability within [the kitchen]. He was also indirectly taught by Victor, the cook at his teenage summer camp, how women can be treated in kitchens—he sees Victor groping Irina (also a teenager). This obviously all comes back to bite him in the ass later in the book, during the sections that reference #MeToo and his involvement.

What do you think the novel is interested in saying about community and accountability? How does one atone when they’ve wronged their community, betrayed it?

SA: When I was finishing this in the end of 2020…the restaurant industry and the medical world were in the middle of two seismic events: Covid-19 and #MeToo. It was a vast reckoning and an overdue one. My first instinct was to protect August, and then I was like, no—of course he [participated]. 

When it comes to what he does at the end, I wondered, how can someone like that make amends? You use your resources. You lift other people up. You do your best. You can’t undo what you did outright, and you will never absolve yourself of the guilt. So you use the guilt to do good, and that’s sort of what he’s trying to do at the end. And then, of course, his body and the past catches up with him. 

When it comes to community, he does try to generate that in the end, which Dr. Maya Zhu discovers. And the reason it comes to such a revelation is that this is a book about ambition. I’m fascinated by ambition and power. I’m fascinated by the experience of fame, the way it works and distorts your day to day routine and your interactions with people. But when it comes to ambition, whether it’s artistic or capitalistic, it’s isolated. These are two people whose ambition has isolated them and has made them believe that they can only rely on themselves—especially Maya. August is the living incarnation of male privilege. I didn’t go into it being like, I want to write about privilege—August just is. 

People sometimes ask if Dr. Maya Zhu and August are based on anybody I know. And the reality is they’re both based on me. They both have a piece of me that I rely on, and that I’m very scared of. There’s that part of me that wants to dedicate myself to something absolutely singular, to focus and cut everything else out of my life. And I have two kids. I’ve been with my wife for almost twenty years. I have not been alone as an adult. I wrote this out of fascination: what would it look like if I had that sort of completely unchallenged focus? What could I achieve? I think a lot of artists ask themselves this question. Should I be less human in my dedication to making something human? 

I think it’s a false choice. But I think it’s the devil on our shoulder. So by bringing them to a place where they realize they’re not alone, that was me working through a lot of that for myself. August is like the Miltonian devil; he is so charismatic, so fun to be around. Maya is not that way. She’s brittle, she’s hostile. She’s not friendly. But she’s who I needed her to be to make [the story] work. I don’t think people fall in with her character except maybe me. 

JB: I definitely could definitely relate to aspects of Maya. She reminded me of some friends of mine who feel like, as women, they have to ruthlessly commit themselves to whatever they’re doing in order to be taken seriously, especially in medicine. I thought this was a core tenet of her character that was really well done.

This transitions nicely into my next question: it’s obvious how meticulous your research process was. Of course, I also recognize the limits research has. I’m wondering how you approached the task of depicting experiences—cultural, gendered, and so on—that can’t be understood through research alone with care and credibility.

SA: For each of the characters in the book, big or smell, I’m always telling that one character’s story at a time. Maya is not all Chinese people. Maya is not all immigrants. Writ large, she is not all women in the medical field. Maya’s story is the only one that I’m telling here.

I find that the real danger is when well-intentioned writers try to use characters’ ethnicity or gender or social identities to make a statement. The problematic word there is the verb “use.” They’re not  screwdrivers; they’re people. You can’t make it one-size fits all. I’m not interested in using Maya to make a broader statement about the immigrant experience. 

It’s interesting. If I had set this a hundred years ago, I would have made Maya Jewish. I think there’s a huge strain of that Philip Rothian quality in her. Specifically, there’s this invocation in American Pastoral where he says that the injunction placed on every Jewish child in New York was: make something of yourself. You must not come to nothing. That’s a burden on her. 

JB: It’s pointed out that food and death are two of the worst victims when it comes to over-romanticization in the media, particularly in movies and television. At the same time, there’s clearly a reverence for both occupations in the draft. Were there specific muses—medical dramas, Food Network shows, celebrities—you were writing toward, or even against? 

SA: I think I was writing toward Padma Lakshmi.

JB: Oh, yeah, she does get a shout out.

SA: (laughing) I want Padma to read this and I want to be friends with her.

But yeah, I wanted to write the most accurate book of the restaurant industry ever made. Because you’re right, there’s a lot of romanticizing in this world. This book began life in the era of Gordon Ramsay and it ended in the era of Kwame Onwuachi and Carmy Berzatto. I tried to capture what it feels like to have your world change under you—’cause that’s what really happens to August, right? The rug gets pulled out from under him. 

But when it came to Maya…I became deeply evangelical about autopsies, about the need to educate doctors and patients alike. They are basically an endangered species, and that cost us very deeply during Covid. The way [television] misrepresents the autopsy makes people believe that they’re only in cases of foul play. They pervert the science and demonize the people who conduct them, which has real knock-on effects in the world. 

Most doctors will never see an autopsy. In fact, most doctors will never see, outside of a gross anatomy lab, the body parts that they prescribe medication for, unless you’re a surgeon. And even the surgeon won’t see anything outside of their immediate anatomy. 

Autopsies remain the gold standard for diagnosis. Always have been, pretty much always will be. I would love it if one person reads the novel and it changes their sense of what they want to happen to their body after they die. I would be thrilled. 

JB: August donates his body to science in part so Dr. Maya Zhu can pathologize what was “wrong” with him all his life, seemingly convinced he was biologically-bound to seek pleasure in spite of how it could, and did, hurt those he loved most. Like you mentioned, she takes away her own lessons about human connection and vulnerability. 

With the novel done and out in the world, what lessons have you taken from the process of bringing this story to life? Whether as a writer, a father, or just as a human being. 

SA: I would say the drafting of the novel was only half the experience of making the entire thing. The things I have learned in the last two, three years [about the writing industry] transformed my relationship with the medium. That’s not always a good thing. The process of selling this book was extraordinarily difficult, and the submission process I wouldn’t wish on anybody. 

The most valuable thing I’ve taken away from it is the ability to treat patience like a weapon. I have always been an impatient person. I want to rush the end of drafts. I want to rush to find an agent, to get published, to put out revisions. That’s always been my M.O. It’s only in the last few years that I realized there was a way to tactically take your time as an artist. 

The only weapons you have as an artist are your talent and your patience. And you need the patience to give your talent its space.