Author and Playwright Jordan Tannahill’s Grub Street Diet

The author and playwright Jordan Tannahill — his 2025 production, Prince Faggot, posited “what would happen if, just a few steps down the line of inheritance, there were a guy who loved being a little bitch in bed?” — has spent the past four years working on his new novel, The Living Realm, even though it runs just 160 pages. “It took me a long time to write very few words,” he says, but that pace was deliberate. “I ended up with exactly the book I intended to write.” Part of the process was the last year spent editing. “Even though the bulk of the writing happened a year ago,” Tannahill says, “you’re deep in the world of the novel, and I realize I haven’t left it since I started.” This being summer, though, he did leave it and leave New York (where he lives in the East Village), which is where we start this edition of the “Grub Street Diet.” 

Monday, August 17
I’d woken up in my tent the day before with a very sharp, shooting pain every time I inhaled. I was at Honcho Campout, a queer four-day techno festival in the Pennsylvania woods, which I’d gone to the previous year and had such a wonderful time that I’d gone back. The pain didn’t go away as I went about my morning. In fact, it got worse. I had breakfast, and after breakfast it continued to intensify, so I packed up my things. My friend helped me walk to the top of the road. I found the nearest emergency room, packed my rental car, and drove off for Harrisburg. They ran a few tests and said, “You don’t have COVID, you don’t have the flu; it’s actually a bacterial pneumonia.” I think it came on quite suddenly. I don’t actually think I contracted pneumonia there; my immune system probably just got worn out while I was there. So Monday morning I wake up in UPMC Harrisburg hospital. It’s my first time overnight in a hospital, ever, and my first time in an American hospital. The very first thing I’m ingesting is a steady supply of an IV saline drip and an antibiotic IV. I’m also served breakfast, which is apparently French toast, and I just want something softer and simpler. So I have a yogurt and some fresh fruit and a little bit of coffee.

Everyone is very friendly. As a gay man coming into an ER from a festival, I got a lot of questions — “When was the last time you had unprotected sex? Are you on PrEP? Are you seroconverting?” I assure them, “No, I really don’t believe I am. I think I have pneumonia,” which is what I had. It feels slightly different from what I’m used to at Callen-Lorde, but they were friendly, concerned, kept me overnight, and did everything they needed to do to get me stabilized. God, I hope I have adequate health insurance to cover this. I’m most anxious about the expense. Coming from Canada and then living in the United Kingdom, which has the NHS, those aren’t really concerns at all.

I read Faggots, by Larry Kramer, in the hospital. Grove Press asked me to write the new foreword for the upcoming anniversary edition, so I’m reacquainting myself with the novel. The last time I read it I was in my early 20s, and now, in my late 30s, it resonates differently. I hadn’t been to a lot of these locations when I first read it — Fire Island, the Ice Palace, the Meat Rack — places that are still active within the queer ecology that I’m part of now in New York. I’m also essentially the exact age of the protagonist. He’s 38 or 39.

I am getting discharged shortly, but I get lunch before I do. I order the salmon, which is something my husband claims I always do: order fish at the exact place where I shouldn’t order fish. I think this proves him right. I don’t know why I’m inclined to order salmon at a hospital, but I do. It comes out white, more like cod, I suppose. Maybe it is cod. I eat the mystery salmon and some broccoli and a juice cup. The food is not great, but the staff is lovely and that makes up for it.

I’m discharged around 3 p.m., though it takes me about an hour to get my medication from the pharmacy. I still have my rental car, so I drive myself home to New York, maybe four hours. I’m still feeling a little bit of pain when I breathe, but much less than the previous day, and a little bit feverish. I’m on lots of ibuprofen, which helps. I know my husband, Brandon, is waiting for me at home, and it’ll be lovely to see him and sleep in my own bed. In the car, I listen to a few episodes of Ezra Klein’s podcast. I get gas, return the car — things just take time — and I’m walking to my door around 9:30 or 10, after dinner hour. I don’t think I can eat much, so I have some toast and some hot water with honey and go to bed.

Tuesday, August 18
Like a lot of mornings, I have oatmeal with chia seeds, some grapefruit, and coffee. I’m a big fan of Partners Coffee. We have it delivered to our house in periodic shipments, and we grind our own every morning. I drink it black, pretty strong. This week, Brandon decided to start making his own cold brew. He bought these cold-brew glass containers — you grind a coarse grind of coffee, put it into this filter that goes down almost the entire length of the container, fill it with lukewarm water, and leave it for 48 hours. We were spending so much goddamn money on iced coffee this summer that we were like, “We should just make it ourselves.” Honestly, it’s really fantastic. I’m a total convert. I tend to lean toward hot coffee myself, but the novelty of making it ourselves really appeals to me. Brandon is definitely an iced-coffee guy.

I walk the dogs as quickly as I can. They are both rescues. One is kind of corgi-like; her name is Moses. And one is kind of terrier-like; his name is Charlie. They’re very goofy, very fun. They’re Brandon’s dogs, but I’ve come to adopt them as my own children, and because I tend to walk them and feed them, they’re particularly attached to their stepdad. Moses is very reluctant to be walked. She hates living in Manhattan. She was a COVID dog for Brandon, so she spent her first year in a quiet backyard in L.A., and it’s been a very hard adjustment ever since. Charlie absolutely loves walking through the East Village. He loves to sniff absolutely everything and mark everything. He’s a big pee-er. I try to curb him as the signs tell you to do.

My breathing is better, but I still feel lots of sensation. I’m coughing very frequently, coughing up bloody mucus, and feeling pain. I run a nice hot bath and sit reading Faggots in the bath. That helps. For lunch, I start eating lots of white-bean-and-spinach soup — Tuscan white-bean soup from Westside Market. I’m drinking lots of Lifeway blueberry kefir to counteract the strong antibiotics I’m on.

I’m really bad at just lying in bed doing nothing. I go a bit stir crazy. So I’m taking pleasure in having an excuse not to do all the admin that consumes a day and just writing for pleasure — playing around with a new idea for a play, which may become something or may not. It’s almost like playing in the lab, R&D, exploring certain images, certain ideas, certain characters, and seeing if something catches fire and begins to smolder. I do my best writing when I’m not also trying to multitask, when I don’t have a lot of social commitments. I have some honey-roasted pistachios and trail mix as a snack while I try to work.

Brandon is a wonderful cook. He makes this chickpea-apricot tagine with minced lamb meatballs. He’s in tech rehearsals at night for Marina, this play at Little Island by Julio Torres and Martine Gutierrez, yet still managing to cook during the day and have this lovely food for me.

I go to bed quite early, around 11,  which is early for me, and take a melatonin gummy. I know I will be on a steady diet of those all week to really knock me out and give me a deep sleep. Very much appreciated.

Wednesday, August 19
I have a cup of coffee, but I need some more protein, so I boil some eggs — two boiled eggs for breakfast with sourdough toast and some kimchee, again for the gut biome, the gut flora, which is being a bit ravaged.

At the same time as Faggots I’ve been rereading my friend Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Exit Party, which comes out in a couple of weeks. She’s an incredible author — she writes literary speculative fiction, and Exit Party is very much that: a near-future America that has eroded and devolved into civil war. I’d read early drafts, so I wanted to know what she did with it ultimately, what final form the book took.

I take the dogs for a walk around the block. We live in the East Village. We moved in two summers ago, and I love it so much. I feel like there are these frequent glimpses of an older New York, a New York of the ’70s and ’80s. When we moved in, Gary Indiana, a really meaningful writer in our lives, lived a block away on 11th, one of the last survivors of that generation that included Kathy Acker and the original Village Voice. A block away from us on 12th and Second, above the Village East theater, is where David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar had their apartment. I walk by that every day and think about that lineage, that foundational queer culture of the ’70s and ’80s. We’re a block away from St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, where Patti Smith played her very first punk poems and Allen Ginsberg read and the Black Panthers operated out of in the ’70s. Brandon and I got married there a couple of years ago. Even though we’ve only been here a couple of years, I feel increasingly part of this neighborhood, even of the particular apartment building we live in — knowing our neighbors, having a community here in a way that I really value.

For lunch, Brandon very kindly makes a tuna salad, which is really nice — albacore tuna, green onion, dill, lemon, salt and pepper, mayonnaise, of course — also with sourdough toast. Brandon is doing double duty: husband and actor. He plays three different characters in Marina, all three of whom are Marina’s suitors. Marina is this mermaid-esque sea creature played by Martine. It’s this beautiful, very funny, also quite moving trans allegory around love and dating and community. I keep joking that it’s like The Little Mermaid meets Under the Skin.

I am supposed to go to a screening of a friend’s film. I am really gearing up for it, and then I have to message them: “I’m too sick. I don’t think it’s contagious; I’m on antibiotics, I don’t have a fever, but I’ve got to stay home.” So once again, stay home and read. For dinner, I have leftovers of the tagine.

Thursday, August 20
Breakfast is peanut butter and cut-up banana on toast with black coffee.

I do an interview with Adam Eli for Cultured about the book. He’s wonderful, really thoughtful. It’s my first one for the book, and Adam is very patient with me as I figure out how to talk about it. A novel is an intensely private, solitary experience for many years, and then suddenly it becomes this public experience. It’s helpful to talk it through with a few friends first to get the hang of it.

I’m definitely feeling better today. On my walk with the dogs, I stop in at Apollo Bagels, where I go almost weekly. My dogs are known by name there. I get my favorite of the whole menu: a plain bagel, toasted, with smoked whitefish salad, mustard, pickled peppers, fresh cucumber and dill, and pepper on top. It’s open-faced. I eat it on the bench outside the shop and then walk the dogs home.

I also need to treat myself to some junk food. I’m feeling a bit down, so I buy myself a box of French Toast Crunch from the bodega. It’s absolutely delicious. I go to the Strand and pick up an opening-night gift for Brandon. Opening isn’t until the following Thursday, the 27th, but I hate scrambling at the last minute. I don’t have a predetermined gift in mind — I want to go and be inspired at the bookstore. As I’m walking to check out, I have two other books in my hand, both of which are gifts I probably would’ve gotten myself, which is never the right thing to do. Then I saw Life of M, by Rachel Cusk, face-up on the table, and I remembered he’d posted about wanting to read it and whether anyone had an advance copy. I think, Oh my God, here it is; it’s published already, I can just buy it for him. So I shelve the other two and get that one, plus a card and a bag. I also pick up a copy of Don Quixote for myself. If I’m going to spend a lot of time in bed, I need a big book.

I go to see a doctor at Callen-Lorde. She listens to my lungs and makes me take deep breaths. They are still pretty crackly. She prescribes me another ten-day course of antibiotics and makes me schedule a chest X-ray after that to make sure they work. She is not happy to hear about all these errands I’ve been running. “You’ve got to act like an old man. You’ve got to stay in bed.” I’m really very bad at just lying in bed all day, even if I have something to do. I get too antsy. But she really drives it home, and she was the one really insisting on more hot liquids and so forth. When I get home, I have some red grapes as a snack.

For dinner, Brandon prepares this incredible gochujang salmon — I think it’s from a New York Times “Cooking” recipe, or he modified it from one — which really makes up for the mystery salmon I had at the hospital earlier in the week.

Friday, August 21
Breakfast is the French Toast Crunch, which I’m still working my way through, ravenously. And coffee.

I take the dogs to the vet. You know how owners resemble their dogs and dogs resemble their owners? Charlie has been having this cough, almost like he’s trying to cough up a hairball. It’s like, Oh God, are we both stricken with the same pneumonia? So I take them both in and have the vet look. They say the coughing is nothing to worry about, but Charlie does have a very minor infection from a tick — the least worrisome of the possible infections he could have from a tick — and he is put on an oral antibiotic. We’re both on antibiotics, both sick from being in the woods.

For lunch, I pick up chicken green curry from Pranakohn, one of my local spots that I go to all the time. It’s this great Thai restaurant, and the green curry is just the thing I needed that day. I’m definitely guilty of intra-neighborhood deliveries, but I’m trying to get better at just going to the restaurant and picking it up. It genuinely is four blocks away. So I do that this time.

For dinner, I cook myself Italian sausage and broccoli rabe. I’ve been relying on my wonderful husband this week, but I do cook for myself sometimes and this is a go-to. Brandon is rehearsing at Little Island, and — really against doctor’s orders, I think — I have to take the dogs for their evening walk anyway, and I would love to just see how Marina is unfolding on the island. Brandon’s getting out really late, and he’s starving by the time he’s done, so I’m going to buy some snacks, things I know he likes, for the walk home. From Westside Market: tamari almonds, pepperettes, Gin Gin ginger chews, black-and-white cookies — one of his go-to desserts — and Diet Coke, which is his beverage of choice. I put it all in a bag, get the dogs, and walk across Manhattan, about half an hour, only to be told, unfortunately, no dogs allowed on the island. I really should have checked that one before I left with them.

So I just sit outside waiting for their dress rehearsal to finish, and honestly it’s lovely. I so seldom just go to a park, go to a bench at night, and sit and look at the water. And there are a lot of people doing that — couples, groups of friends, people by themselves, just sitting looking out at the Hudson, chatting, listening to music. I’m holding both dogs, who are probably a little confused, and listening to the fantastic new L’Rain album — Taja Cheek’s moniker, just beautiful — and eating the snacks I brought for Brandon. Then he comes out, and we hug.

I am defying my doctor’s orders a little bit here, but it’s nice to get out of the house. There are certain unexpected rewards from being forced to slow down and change your habits, and being sick really did change my dietary habits. I usually have a very, very active, busy calendar, and canceling plans felt almost exhilarating — to just read, draw a bath, and read in the bath. That had its own pleasures.

See All