“I like diner-style burgers too,” a guy tells me, leaning over conspiratorially at a fancy dinner party.

It always shocks me that people know these intimate details about my life.

It’s because when you’re writing a memoir, you have 2 thoughts:

1. No one’s going to read this.

2. No one cares about the minutiae of my life.

But different things jump out at different people. My book, The 30-Second Commute, covers my career (as book, music and restaurant critic among other things) and various things about my life experiences thus far, and it seems everyone has their favourite part, or one that sticks with them the most.

It is honestly hard to fathom, now, a year after the book’s publication, that I had the courage to lay out some of the most telling details of my life. But then, this is the only way I know how to write. No matter how difficult it may be to reveal so much, for me it would be 1,000 times harder to try to fictionalize it all.

So when I write, whether it’s a book or a feature article, I am of the mind that no one knows me, so it’s just personal details I’m including about “some person,” not specifically Stephanie Dickison.

And I take great comfort in the fact that North America is so caught up in what Magnolia Bakery’s cupcake Suri Cruise is currently obsessed with. It takes the pressure off, knowing that if I talk about something from my life, it’s certainly not going to be gossiped about with the same exuberance as, say, Jennifer Aniston’s lack of lasting love or which Hills star got plastic surgery and where.

That doesn’t mean I don’t want to be famous. I mean, I would be fine with that. And if, say, some publication wanted to pick up on the fact that in my book I write about my encounters with both Stephen King and Oprah Winfrey, well, that would be all right. I don’t know what I’d wear, but I’ll come up with something . . .

But of course I do not write for fame or money or accolades. Like many writers, I write to educate, inform and entertain, and deeper down I write to be understood, to reveal my innermost thoughts and feelings.

And if sometimes those are embarrassing or TMI (Too Much Information), then I can live with that too.

So I will continue to write about my life as a full-time freelancer with all the successes and failures that come with it as well as the intensely personal details, things only close friends know. That is, until I publish them in a widely read publication.

Details revealed in my book:

• My one-bedroom apartment, with my tiny little rolltop desk at the end of the bed, where I live with the love of my life, Scott (who also happens to be a writer working from home), and our 18-pound cat, Cosmo.
• My work as a restaurant critic, where eating out for a living brings much joy and occasionally a stomach ache (especially after a lot of Indian). And many an expanded waistband.
• The time I interviewed a famous hip-hop artist and realized that the tape recorder didn’t catch a damn thing.
• The beauty & fashion products piled behind our bedroom door (remember, we have just the one). For a year-and-a-half we not-so-jokingly referred to the boudoir as “the stockroom.”

Things I have yet to reveal:

• I was dining in a French restaurant and the waitress pointed out a rat on the other side of the French doors beside us. Twice.
• An editor sent me a page-long letter about what a poor writer I am. She numbered the reasons and everything.
• I not-so-secretly want to saw our apartment door in half and run a little take-out counter out of here. Specials would include a soup of the day, intriguing salads and hot roast lunches and dinners.
• The day I found out I got a regular column in a paper with over a million readers I was dying to go out and commemorate the momentous occasion by getting a tattoo I’d been wanting, but I didn’t have any money.
• I am way more technically savvy than people give me credit for (because I’m soft-spoken and blonde). In fact I can rock the s**t out of html and social media. Seriously.
• I made one guy’s Top 10 worst books list.
• I want to write as many books as time will allow. Apparently, I think I can prove that guy wrong.

Was that TMI?

Oh, what the hell. You only live once.

You might as well write down all the juicy details.

Copyright Stephanie Dickison 2010.