Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner, and this is a bonus episode with Samine Nasrat.

She is the author of Salt Fat Acid Heat, a best-selling book about food and cooking and

about Samine herself.

The book was also turned into a four-part Netflix series you may have seen.

Samine was featured in our most recent episode What's Wrong with Being a One Hit Wonder.

As you probably know, for most of our episodes, I speak with a variety of guests, parts of

the conversations make it into the finished episode, but the rest gets edited out.

Once in a while, there's a full interview that's so interesting and surprising and we think,

oh, it's too bad no one else will ever hear the whole thing.

And that's how we felt about this conversation.

So we decided to go ahead and publish it as a bonus episode.

It is a wide-ranging and candid conversation about the upsides and downsides of living

a creative life.

It's about growing up in an immigrant family and feeling out of place and feeling additionally

displaced after a family tragedy.

If you have already listened to What's Wrong with Being a One Hit Wonder, there will be

a few familiar parts.

And Samine also makes a couple references to one of the research papers we discussed in

that episode.

Last study showed that first-time cookbook authors who win an award tend to not publish

another book within five years, theoretically because they're afraid to diminish their

newfound creative reputation.

...