The Author: Sam Ashworth
The Book: The Death and Life of August Sweeney (Santa Fe Writer’s Project, 2025)
The Elevator Pitch: The rise and fall of legendary Chef August Sweeney, told through his autopsy at the hands of a woman he mysteriously handpicked for the job.
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The Rumpus: Where did the idea of your book come from?
Sam Ashworth: In 2012 or so, I was a bartender in Boston. I was sitting in a sister bar with a coworker, and as you do, we started talking about dead bodies. She told me about Mary Roach’s book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, and I said out loud, “What if you could tell a person’s life story by dissecting their body?” And then I stared into the middle distance for a long time. The whole book happened in that moment. I didn’t know what the story would be, but I knew that I was writing it, and more than that, I knew why: because I had no idea what was happening inside my own body, and the same was true for most of us who don’t have medical degrees. The human body is the most miraculous machine, and each of us gets one—just one.
Rumpus: How long did it take to write the book?
Ashworth: A good decade, on and off. I started writing it right away—in fact, I spent a day in the kitchen of the restaurant where the idea had struck, learning how to make charcuterie. The opening scene of the book, in which August Sweeney discovers a rotting pig head in the walk-in, came out of that experience. It has barely changed in the years since. At the time, though, I was shopping a different novel, and when I found an agent for it, I stopped work on this one for about four years. I returned to it in 2017, when I had the time and access to research that I needed to really dig into it. I finished it at the end of 2020.
Rumpus: Is this the first book you’ve written? If not, what made it the first to be published?
Ashworth: Nope! I wrote a whole other novel, found an agent, was told to make it YA because the protagonist was seventeen, did as I was told, rewrote the novel, went on submission, rewrote it again, went back on submission, got interest from FSG and was told to rewrite the first fifty pages, did as I was told, fucked it all up, and finally let the thing die in like 2015, by which point I realized that no amount of rewriting or genre-bending was going to change the fact that I hated the book. I had loved the first version, though now it seems pretty juvenile (I was like, twenty-four), but every time I’d tried to rewrite it, I was always trying to achieve the same thing: write something someone would buy, something that would bring me the validation I wanted.
I learned a lot from that experience, especially how to keep a story moving fast until I want to slow it down, but the most valuable thing was that I learned how to know when you’re working on something good or bad. I thought hating one’s manuscript after a few years was normal for writers. It wasn’t until I was in the depths of submission with August Sweeney that I understood that that’s like saying it’s normal to hate your spouse after a few years. Being frustrated by a book is fine, but hating it is a real bad sign. No matter how long August took, or how much the process wore on me, I never felt like I’d done anything other than write something I loved. Against all odds, August wound up being exactly the book I’d imagined in that bar in Boston.
Rumpus: In submitting the book, how many no’s did you get before your yes?
Ashworth: At least thirty-five. I want to be transparent here: I wouldn’t wish my submission process on anyone. After the debacle with the first book, I chose an agent who was very senior at a mega-agency but who had little experience in literary fiction, over a younger agent who would have edited the book more before publication. August Sweeney was always going to be a tough sell—the words “told through his autopsy” aren’t something anyone wants to have to say at a P&L meeting. A few weeks after I turned in the manuscript, which was very drafty, the very senior agent blasted it out to over thirty publishers. Worse, it was December 2020, mid-pandemic, and The Bear hadn’t come out yet, meaning people weren’t out there saying “Yes, chef!” to their spouses. With very few recent novels about the inner workings of restaurants to compare the book to, we got what Cole Escola might call a madcap medley of rejections. In the space of one week, one indie publisher called it “too commercial,” and another one said, “We don’t know how to market this.” Unsurprisingly I wound up in therapy.
Because he’d sent it to so many people, replies came steadily, and it got to a point where I’d jump anytime I heard my phone ping with an email, thinking, “This is the one!” And it never was. This went on for twenty months. In the end, I sold it myself: I brought the book to Santa Fe Writers Project, and they weren’t one bit scared of the subject matter. And I called up the younger agent and said, “I should have gone with you in the first place,” and now I have.
Rumpus: Which authors and writers buoyed you along the way? How?
Ashworth: Aside from Mary Roach, whose work I adore, this book owes a huge debt to Ian McEwan’s Saturday, which is a day in the life of a London neurosurgeon. I heard McEwan talk back in 2015 or so, and he said he spent two years shadowing neurosurgeons, even getting to the point where he found himself able to deliver play-by-play on surgeries to med students who’d mistaken him for a doctor. That was the standard I aspired to. Unfortunately, Saturday came out in 2005, which made it useless as a comp title.
The thing that’s really buoyed me in the last six months has been this 2025 Debut Litfic Authors slack launched by Karissa Chen (Homeseeking). There are like twelve of us in there now, all huddled together trading anxieties and support, and I cannot tell you how good it’s been for my mental health.
Rumpus: How did your book change over the course of working on it?
Ashworth: The single biggest change was that in the original concept, Maya Zhu wasn’t a doctor: she was a medical student, one who could read a body like you or I read a text, and the novel would unfurl over the course of her gross anatomy class, which is the course where all first-year med students dissect a cadaver over a semester. I also had one big question, which was who the body on her table would be. I knew I wanted it to be the most interesting body I could think of something to really ensorcell Maya, but I didn’t know who the person was.
Then I visited a friend’s anatomy lab and walked into a room with forty cadavers in various stages of dissection. I wasn’t sure how I would react, but I definitely wasn’t expecting to get extremely hungry. Apparently, this is very common. I’m sure there’s a comforting explanation for this involving the brain reacting to the presence of death by subconsciously triggering our appetite, craving nourishment and energy, etcetera, but the reality is, look, preserved human muscle looks a lot like brisket. I don’t know how else to put it. You look at it and you get hungry. So that was how I realized that the body needed to be a chef. Because to write about the human body is to write about human appetite. That’s what the book is really about: what it means to hunger, and what it means to be satisfied.
The problem then became how to combine two people’s stories when one is dead and one’s not. I love story architecture, and for a long time, I imagined the book following Maya’s adventure through gross anatomy. Students start by examining the abdomen, while the rest of the body is covered by muslin, so as not to freak them all out. Week in, week out, they unwrap and dissect the cadaver part by part, until they get to the face, and then finally the hands—the most intimate part of the body. I was going to tell August’s story out of order, using body parts as portals of discovery. But then I had to accept that no medical student, no matter how gifted, would have the knowledge I needed Maya to have. Worse, August’s story didn’t want to be all out of order; he was becoming a freight train, and all I could do was keep him on the tracks.
So, Maya became a fully-fledged doctor, a pathologist, and gross anatomy turned into a medical autopsy. And now I had a new problem: I am extremely not a pathologist.
Rumpus: Before your first book, where has your work been published?
Ashworth: I used to write regularly for the Washington Post Magazine, before they killed it. I also wrote for Elemental, and they killed that too. I wrote for the reincarnated Gawker, which they killed again, and now seem to have re-resurrected. I’m starting to wonder if I’m like Stephanie Hsu in that show, Laid, where she discovers that everyone she sleeps with dies. I’m still writing for the Washington Post book review, Eater, and Punch, and now I’m worried about them. I also have to say I loved writing for The Rumpus. It’s the only place that ever said, “Write what you want, we’ll run it.” Secretly, I’m also a best-selling author: my main day job is ghostwriting. Boo.
Rumpus: What is the best advice someone gave you about publishing?
Ashworth: I’ve received no end of good advice about writing, but when it comes to publishing, only two things have really helped. An editor friend named Emma Berry told me, “Shame does not sell books,” and I basically have that tattooed on my arm at this point. The other thing was from novelist Ben Purkert, who reminded me that when the book comes out, a lot of things that you expect/hope to happen, like reviews or awards or best-of lists, won’t happen, but a lot of things you never expected to happen will happen, and they’ll be all the better for being unexpected.
Rumpus: Who’s the reader you’re writing to, or tell us about your target audience and how you cultivated or found it?
Ashworth: By marrying her. My target audience is my wife. It’s a simple system: nothing I write goes into the world until she reads it and says, “I love it.” If she doesn’t, she says so, and I rework it until she does.
Rumpus: What is one completely unexpected thing that surprised you about the process of getting your book published?
Ashworth: The thing I can’t get over is how much I feel like being a working writer today means spending a huge amount of our creative energy on things that have no bearing whatsoever on our actual writing and that frankly we shouldn’t know the first fucking thing about. I’m talking about understanding Amazon algorithms, gaming Goodreads, pitching listicles, begging people for blurbs, converting media hits to orders from booksellers, getting reviews, penetrating most-anticipated lists, making social media videos, setting up bookstore events, and on and on and on. None of that is the work, and yet it’s what we find ourselves working on, and judging ourselves for, to the point that the actual novel starts to feel incidental to the process. This isn’t just the case for indie writers, either; big five writers are being told to do this stuff too. Writers have always had to self-market, but not on this scale, or with so little to show for it.
I came into this process armed with more knowledge than many debut authors. I literally teach a class at George Washington University called “The Working Writer,” which I created to give students a grasp of how to make a proper, sustainable career out of writing. And still I knew nothing when it came to the publicity and marketing stuff. I have no idea how booksellers or rights-buyers think, but somehow I felt responsible for figuring it out, because the worst thing is the feeling that if your book tanks, you have no one to blame but yourself, like you could control your fate if you worked hard enough. But that’s a lie. From the minute you send a manuscript to an agent, you start to lose control of it. The only thing you can control, at the end of the day, is what you write next.
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Author photograph courtesy of Sam Ashworth
