MIKEY BELL

Originally published in The Western Mail (July 2026) this piece explores the process of getting my memoir published. If you missed it in print the first time around, you can now read it below.

‘I WASN’T SUPPOSED TO WRITE A MEMOIR…’

by Mikey Bell

How an Egg Changed My Life was not supposed to be my debut book. For years I had imagined a more recipe-forward cookbook as my first published work, and for it, I had been developing a single-subject to focus on. Welsh food and cooking were my first choice, as the interlocked practices and principles have been intwined through my life as early as I could chew lamb and roll dough. I pitched the idea to my publisher and shortly began development. However, the book we started was not the book we finished.

As early as scribbling nonsense into notepads as a child, I have always tried to make sense of life through stories, and many years after the scribbles, I found a home in recipe writing and launched a food blog. I learned to use taste and texture and flavour and method to tell my stories and share my lessons, believing that everything I could learn in the kitchen was just as useful to know outside of it. For a decade, I grew very comfortable in speaking to people through grams and litres and the more recipes I wrote, the more I used them as a hiding place to avoid putting any emotional detail in my words.

When the time came to move my writing from a website to a book, I found Calon, a non-fiction publisher who championed the varied and fascinating stories of Wales, and I knew I had found a perfect place for my Welsh cookbook idea. I told them stories of lamb cawl with dumplings greeting me home from a tough day at school, and the Welsh cakes my mother made for me following an existential crisis trip to Italy, and also the crempogau (Welsh pancakes) I cooked for my nieces-in-law when I was falling in love with my English partner. As I pieced together the little specks of food pleasures peppered through my life, I was unknowingly telling the story of an existence. Calon proposed that perhaps the journey of my identity was the true story to be told, and suggested I write a food memoir instead.

I was apprehensive. ‘Just get to the recipe!’ is a long-running joke online aimed at food writers who write long, sprawling stories to preface a recipe. Nobody wants a long read about your relationship with your grandmother just to find out how to roast a chicken. I know how this can frustrate the online hungry cook. As a result, I was always hesitant to put life and recipes together. What’s more is that I believed my life could never translate into something readable, let alone relatable, and worthy to put between two covers. Memoirs were for celebrities, politicians and war heroes. They were not for gay valley boys with big appetites and bigger expectations of life, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t been tempted. 

A few years prior, during the pandemic, I didn’t have the dexterity to take up crochet and had no desire to make sourdough starters, so I instead challenged myself creatively. I realised that I had been restricting myself to a headnote and recipe for over a decade of writing, and so I pushed myself beyond this format and wrote a story-led, food centric, emotionally forward essay about cooking with my grandmother when I was a little boy. It was titled How an Egg Changed My Life. Feeling as though I had just learned how to speak a new language, I couldn’t deny myself the pleasure of acknowledging, dismantling and rebuilding more memories through words. And so, I continued writing. Soon, I had a small handful of essays that tracked the key food stories of my life. Not brave enough to do anything with them (‘just get to the recipe!’) I filed them away.

Encouraged warmly by my publisher, I pulled those essays from the drawer and examined them for a story worth telling. Amongst the pages, alongside recipes for homemade pasta with sage and pistachio butter sauce, pomegranate and treacle ham and carrot cake with pecan brown butter frosting, I read the story of my life. I read about times when I lost who I was while trying to be who I was not. I found the story of how it felt to fall apart and attempt to make a masterpiece from the pieces. I found stories of burgeoning identity, love, friendships, family, resilience, grief, reinvention, ambition, success, heartbreak, wanderlust, everything that makes a life, and while a story like this is specific, it is not unique. 

I spoke to my friends and learned that we had all been secretly struggling to slot ourselves into the life stencil that society had shaped for us. Regardless of the specificities of our journeys, we were all united by the same thing, which was dedicating huge portions of our lives trying to do what’s right when it feels a little bit wrong and missing the miracle in the crossfire. That’s when I realised that this story was the book I had to write first. Through my own journey of redefining life’s expectations, I had to introduce myself via the most important lessons I have ever learned. How an Egg Changed My Life, in its heartbeat, is a gay man’s journey of identity and appetite, but its lifeblood is the journey of wanting to see the world as a landscape for joy.

It is a book for anyone who needs to know that the answers to many of life’s questions about fulfilment are simpler than you think. It might just be a recipe for a boiled egg or a roast chicken or a carrot cake, but it could also be so much more, if we allow it to be. I wouldn’t know how to live if it were not for the lessons that I learned while cooking, eating, and living through the pages if this book. They taught me so much about what it means to cherish a big, unwavering, passionate appetite, not just for food, but for life itself. My one goal for publishing them as my debut is to tell the story of how to look for joy in the right places, to never rush and ‘just get to the recipe,’ and to always stay hungry for more.

How an Egg Changed My Life: A Memoir is out now, published by Calon.