Images
I didn't like being a model. It feels weird to stand in your knickers in front of people you aren't married to.
Sophie Dahl
I always had boyfriends, whether I was skinnier or rounder.
My modeling career was really just a long accident - one that happened to coincide with my chocolate-cake phase.
It's so easy to fetishise the dead. We rose-tint or villainise them, and so often in the retelling they are saints or sinners, rather than flawed humans muddling along like the rest of us.
A formative cookbook for me was Nigella Lawson's 'How to Eat.' Its warm, conversational tone is wonderful.
When I modeled, my name always came with a preface: 'the voluptuous Sophie Dahl.' I was the anti-waif, as round as a Rubens.
I'm doing what I've always wanted to do: being a mum, writing, living in the country, having a happy time.
There is nothing better than a proper breakfast.
I don't feel any pressure to live up to the legacy of my grandfather; if I did, I'd be mad. I'm as much of a fan of his work as anyone.
So much for the myth that motherhood is all Laura Ashley smocks and skipping through fields. People think it's rose-tinted and they don't tell the truth!
I love anchovies in sauces, but on their own, they're repellent: their lurid pink bodies spook me out.
My mother Tessa married my stepfather, James, when I was three and we lived in Boston for a year.
I think that if you really love a book, there's nothing nicer than to have a first edition of it.
I absolutely didn't think, 'I am really fat, I must get thinner.'
I wasn't lonely as a child. I was the eldest of four and always had lots of people around me.
I can't eat at all when I get sad; all I want is soup and easy-to-swallow baby food and, of all things, jelly babies.
I'd love to master another language properly.
My childhood was such an odd one, but with such magic, and the quirky grown-ups who were in it managed to still bring a huge sense of love and magic, so for that I'm really grateful.
I have nothing against a good facelift.
My mother tells this joke about how when I was little I used to say, 'Mummy, all I want is a stable home!' and she'd reply, 'That's all right, darling, we'll buy you a stable.'
My grandmother is really awful sometimes.
I certainly wouldn't feel safe telling people I was writer.
I was very lucky that I didn't end up a basket case.
I have a great deal of admiration for my mum.
Starving isn't sexy. What's sexy is a healthy appreciation for food.
When I was at school I wanted to be a writer and an actress. Then this whole modelling thing happened.
I would never have got involved in something that just meant turning up at eight and leaving at five.
I'm always either listening to 'Hamilton', which makes me cry, or Giggs, who makes me laugh.
It really was total heaven to be a writer. As a model or actor you are employed on someone's whim. As a writer, you are in control.
At 18 I wanted to study art history in Florence. I think I just fancied myself as Sophia Loren, wearing a foxy dress and walking through a market with a basket bursting full of figs.
I was greedy and ate in that unselfconscious way teenagers do, constantly grazing and eating when I wasn't hungry.
I don't want to deride London because I have such a huge affection for it, but New York lets you move on and grow up.
I like good manners, old-fashioned courting, I like being wooed.
I remember being home alone when I was about 13 and making a souffle from a recipe in one of my mother's old cookbooks. I approached it in a very unafraid way, and produced a rather beautiful one.
I think it would be a bit miserable going out with somebody who was totally uninterested in food.
I have always been tall. When I was five, I towered above all the boys in my class, so it is something I have grown up with.
It was a really lucky childhood and while, yeah, there were bits of darkness, which is known about because my mother has made no bones about her struggle with depression, the overriding memory of it is a very happy, good one.
My size wasn't something that I'd ever spent a huge amount of time thinking about - I guess at the age of 17 or 18 you don't.
My younger sister, Clover arrived three days before my seventh birthday and I wanted to sell her. I'd had my mother, stepfather, and nanny Maureen, all to myself, and suddenly there was this bonny baby with green grass eyes that everyone adored.
Central heating is my vice - I have it on a bit too much as I am always cold. I try to make up for it in other green ways.
I've spent a great deal of my life one way or another talking about food or eating food.
Modelling is a bit baffling when you're 18. I just thought, 'Brilliant - I get paid lots of money to walk down a runway.' I didn't think I was signing up to be a poster girl for anything.
I think with girls you have a real responsibility in terms of how you discuss the physical. Talking about your looks or body in a derogatory way doesn't do them any favours.
Fashion should be about making clothes that make all women look beautiful, not making women starve so that they can fit in a size 8.
It's nice being married to someone who likes to read because you can indulge in geeky conversations about books.
I eat very simple food, really. A lot of it tending towards nursery food.
I do love cooking, but our kitchen is nothing fancy or hi-tech.
On my raw food diet, my skin shone bright like a gilded deity and my eyes glowed in a somewhat unearthly manner.
I'm sure there were people who were disappointed that I got slimmer, but as one gets older one does often get a bit thinner. There was no great mystery: I had some puppy fat and I lost it.
My siblings and I had a loving but very chaotic and muddled childhood, and as a result we have sought out lives that are consistent and stable, domestic and happy.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10