By Charles Dubow
Photo by Kat Irlin
Many celebrities use professional authors to help with their biographies. Typically, the celebrity and the author spend weeks if not months huddled together taking notes, taping interviews, not infrequently arguing, and generally hashing out the shape the eventual book will take.
But there was nothing typical about the biography that Tarajia Morrell was asked to help write. That’s because the celebrity in question was Pakistani-American chef Fatima Ali and she was dying of cancer.
“My agent approached me about working on Fatima’s story,” says Morrell. “I had just read a brave essay she had written for Bon Appétit about her cancer and was impressed by her and jumped at the chance. I knew she had also been a contestant on “Top Chef” and “Chopped,” as well as appearing on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” This was a woman who was on the cusp of success and then it was all ripped away from her. At the time it was thought she had a year or so to live. The original idea was that it was going to be a bucket-list book about her spending her final months visiting her favorite restaurants around the world. Unfortunately, the cancer spread too quickly and that radically changed the arc of the story we were going to tell.”
What happened instead was that in January 2019 Morrell flew out to Los Angeles to room 435 of UCLA Medical Center’s Cancer Ward. Fatima was already failing and the two only had a week together. Unsurprisingly, this was not the way that Morrell thought the writing of her first book would go.
A native New Yorker whose last name should resonate with oenophiles, Morrell had been searching for a subject for her first book. “I was a struggling actor in my twenties before going to the French Culinary Institute. Once there, I quickly learned that I didn’t want to be a chef. What I wanted was to write about food.” And write she did. Her work has now appeared in many top lifestyle publications, including Departures, The Wall Street Journal, Food & Wine, and Condé Nast Traveler.
Despite getting off to such a difficult start, thanks to Morrell’s determination and the support and input of Fatima’s mother and brother, the book took shape and was sold to Ballantine Books, a division of Penguin Random House. Much of the book was written in Millbrook, where Morrell has been spending weekends and summers since the late 1980s. “My parents started visiting John and Kathy Dyson, the founders of Millbrook Vineyards & Winery, who were our original connection to the region. Eventually they bought their own place and I still come here.” Today, Morrell divides her time between New York and Millbrook, where she is marketing director at Troutbeck.
The book, entitled Savor: A Chef’s Hunger for More by Fatima Ali with Tarajia Morrell, was published to rave reviews in September 2022. Fatima’s voice comes through rich and clear, which is a testament to the quality of Morrell’s craft. It’s a beautiful, warming, and inspiring story—heart-wrenching yet still full of humor, observations about love and family, and, of course, food. “Fatima wanted to leave a legacy of ambition and truth,” says Morrell. “What attracted me to the project was her ambition as a chef. Her bucking traditions of a Pakistani upbringing to create and carve out a career for herself. It was not usual for an educated woman of her background to be a cook. She could have gone to any school but her heart was in cooking. Her mandate was to live life to its fullest. And that is what she did right up to the end.”