Eisner-nominated graphic memoirist Hayden (The Story of My Tits) returns with Where There’s Smoke, There’s Dinner (Top Shelf, Nov.), which tells more of her life story—now through food, recipes, and kitchen disasters. Her distaste for cooking formed young and launched her through a lifetime of culinary woes. With “snarky humor and rollicking curlicue art… it’s Erma Bombeck by way of Julie Doucet,” says PW’s review. We talked to Hayden about eggplants, exploding pizza, and why the perfect meal is still one you don’t have to cook.

This is lighter subject matter than The Story of My Tits, which was about your treatment for breast cancer. What made you decide to turn to cooking?

It started as a joke. At a comics conference, I started telling kitchen stories, cracking myself up. Afterwards, my editor asked if I wanted to turn them into a book. But if I'm going to make my audience laugh, I've got to also bring them to tears, or I'm not satisfied. I couldn’t just anchor it in stories where things blew up and burned, and the smoke detector was always going off. I told myself, Okay, figure it out. Make this therapeutic. What is your problem with cooking?

P.S. I'm still cooking dinner every night, and I still hate it.

Who are your influences as a humorist?

Lucille Ball, first of all, right? I grew up watching I Love Lucy as a treat while I ate dinner every night with my little brother. She was like my second mother. Then, George Carlin—I was a New York kid.

What did you enjoy drawing the most?

I loved the challenge of drawing food and making it appetizing. If I was going to spoof a cookbook, I wanted it to be the kind of thing somebody might pick up in a bookstore to look at the recipes. I really had to think: what does an eggplant look like? What does it feel like?

There are pictures I'm proud of and worked hard on, and the king of those would be the blown-up pizza. I had to make it look real, a little bit dusty, a little bit cheesy. I always say this book combines my hatred of cooking dinner with my love of cookbook illustration.

What was your approach to writing the recipes?

That may have been the biggest challenge. I tried to be a writer when I got out of college, and then I tried to be a children’s book illustrator. Comics liberated me from worrying too much about the pictures or the writing. I got into delivering the two of them from my womb together. This book required more planning, and after a while I realized, boy, you can't just toss off these recipes, can you? No matter how charming you make the illustrations surrounding them, you can't save instructions with someone's facial expression. Recipes brought me back to a love of writing.

In graphic novels, there’s a transformation of the artist that happens in the art itself, because it takes so long to draw the book—things change. I think you'll see the recipes take on a sort of otherworldly role. And that's intentional, but it's also me finally realizing what I wanted to say and how to say it.

Do you have a favorite go-to recipe right now?

I don't. I think I was a hermit in a past life and that I didn't care about food at all. My favorite food really is an apple. And maybe I can add an avocado to it and maybe a piece of toast. So that's my go-to recipe. This to me is the perfect meal, maybe a chunk of cheese, that's dinner.