Where There’s Smoke, There’s Dinner: Confessions of a Cartoonist Cook is an accidental memoir from a woman whose comics earn rave reviews around the world but whose meals earn shrugs around the dinner table.

Bursting with color, flavor, and messy emotions, this unprecedented graphic memoir and “anti-cookbook” blends comics with satirical recipes to explore the intersections of food, feminism, and family. Hayden traces the nuances of her complicated relationship to food. Anecdotal comics alternate with wryly ironic “recipes,” peppered with oven fires, explosions, prayers, and incantations. Along the way, all the salty judgments and bitter frustrations just might caramelize into some real wisdom and self-acceptance. In any case, it’s all hand-painted in mouth-watering color as a tribute to Hayden’s love of cookbooks…or at least the illustrations inside them.

Jennifer Hayden is a graphic novelist whose breast cancer memoir The Story of My Tits was nominated for an Eisner Award and has been translated into three languages. The French edition, Nénés Chéris, was shortlisted for Elle France Magazine's 2022 Comics Grand Prix. Hayden's first collection Underwire was excerpted in The Best American Comics 2013. Her new graphic cooking memoir is called Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner: Confessions of a Cartoonist Cook, and she hopes to use the proceeds from this book to hire a personal chef.

Summer Pierre is a cartoonist living in the Hudson Valley of New York. She is the author of the Eisner nominated memoir, All the Sad Songs, and the highly acclaimed autobiographical comics series Paper Pencil Life.  Her comic on the letters of Sylvia Plath, for Newyorker.com, “Sylvia Plath’s Last Plan,” was a finalist for the Slate Studio Prize. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, NewYorker.com, PEN American, The Comics Journal, among other places. She is currently at work on a new memoir for Fantagraphics.