How a Sober Writer in Austin Eats on an Income That Swings From $0 to Six Figures

In today’s Receipt, we follow a 53-year-old writer in Austin, Texas, who might make six figures one year and $0 the next. Keep reading for her receipts.

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The finances
The diet
The expenses
The diary

The finances

What are your pronouns? She/her

What is your occupation? Writer

How old are you? 53

What city and state do you live in? Austin, Texas

What is your annual salary? Some years $0; sometimes I make six figures. My husband loves Excel spreadsheets, and my wildly unpredictable income drives him nuts. My life as a writer is possible because he has a solid job with benefits that pays for the mortgage, cars, medical bills, rice, and beans. My income pays for extras like dinners out, once-in-a-while vacations (usually research trips for my work), kids’ activities, and now college.

How often are you paid? For books, every three years or so. For freelance writing, every few weeks.

What are your approximate fixed monthly expenses beyond food? (i.e., rent, subscriptions, insurance, bills)

The diet

Do you follow a certain diet or have dietary restrictions? I have been sober for 11 years. Of our three kids, one is vegetarian and two eat a ton of meat.

What are the grocery staples you always buy? Now that two kids are in college, our grocery bill is much smaller. At one point, I was getting two Costco lasagne, two rotisserie chickens, and two to three pounds of hamburger a week. These days, since it’s just three of us at home, grocery shops are simpler. When I’m writing, I make sure to have strong coffee, yogurt, berries, canned soup, and granola on hand. We always have carrots, hummus, microwave popcorn, brownie mix, and ice cream too.

How often in a week do you dine out versus cook at home? We used to cook elaborate meals at home, but at some point, we got so busy that we pretty much only cook well on weekends. During the week, it’s takeout or simple meals at home. If we’re feeling cheap, we bring bread and cheese to Zilker Park. If we can afford to go out to a beloved Austin restaurant, we will.

How often in a week did you dine out while growing up? Once or twice, always at our preppy country club and I always ordered a cheeseburger.

How often in a week did your parents cook at home? My mom cooked every night—one dinner for us kids and a separate one for her and my dad. When they divorced, we got KFC a lot. With extra biscuits.

The expenses

Week’s total: $532.39
Restaurants and cafés total: $301.40
Groceries total: $186.99
Most-expensive meal or purchase: Birthday dinner, $195.99
Least-expensive meal or purchase: Frozen Snickers bar at the movies, $5.94
Number of restaurant and café meals: 7 (including a movie theater snack counter and take-out)
Number of grocery trips: 2

The diary

10:32am: My husband and I start the weekend with a taco “hike,” which involves walking across the Barton Creek Greenbelt to Tacodeli, where we eat tacos at a picnic table and then hike home. I get the Otto (refried black beans, double bacon, avocado, Jack cheese) and my husband gets the Migas Royale Plate (migas, queso, Jack cheese, avocado, and pico de gallo with mashed potatoes, refried black beans, queso fresco, and tortillas). My teen daughter misses the whole thing; she’s still at home asleep. Our total comes to $13.75.

12:00pm: My son, home from college for the day, makes grilled cheese sandwiches for whoever wants them, which is all of us.

7:30pm: After a low-key day, for dinner we have pasta from the pantry and brussels sprouts from the back of the fridge, plus some leftover chicken from the freezer.

9pm: We’re going to host a potluck on Sunday, so I Instacart from our favorite basic grocery store, HEB. Our total comes to $143.02.

We used to host massive parties, but I realized when I stopped drinking that I hated them. One thing about getting sober is that you learn to ask yourself what you truly love and want… and then you say “no” to everything else. This felt like a selfish secret for a while, but it saved my life.

Now, we will have a few close friends over for dinner, and they can bring what they want to drink. My family drinks cans and cans of Kirkland sparkling water, and on special occasions, my favorite Tehuacán Brillante. I actually like a lot of NA cocktails—there’s an Amaro one in a can that’s fantastic—but they’re expensive sugar bombs, so it’s usually Kirkland grapefruit sparkling water in a coupe glass for me.

9:30pm: Our Instacart order arrives with no pork tenderloin—there was none left at that location—so my husband pops out to buy pork tenderloin at a nearby grocery, Sprouts. The cost is $15.93.

11pm: Instacart miraculously finds pork tenderloin and a shopper delivers it. I answer the door in pajamas and give him a tip, which comes to a total of $28.04. We end up with lots of meat, hooray!

11:43am: We once lived in New Orleans, and in those boozy days, I loved a bar called The Saturn. A new bar and restaurant in Austin called The High Road has the same vibes—it’s cozy and welcoming, a place to stay a while. The chef, Kate Roussett, is from Louisiana and knows her Cajun and Creole cuisine.

I like the High Road for brunch: We split a grapefruit and beet salad with fennel; a Hott Texan sandwich with house-made sausage; and I splurge on a “Zaddy” NA cocktail with fake tequila, for old times’ sake. We get a pound each of smoked andouille sausage and Lone Star beer bratwurst to-go. (We have a big freezer in the garage.) The total for drinks and sausage comes to $66.98.

6pm: For our potluck, my husband makes pork tenderloin from a Rick Bayless cookbook on his Big Green Egg, and I make a goat cheese appetizer that doesn’t turn out very well and nobody eats but me. Our friends bring a salad, broccolini, and an amazing carrot cake with pineapple and raisins.

8am: My husband makes a big pot of Starbucks coffee and goes to work. As far as I can tell, all he eats until dinner is coffee, but my therapist encourages me to stay on my side of the street and not comment or hide bananas in his coat pockets.

My daughter packs a lunch of Brie bites, raspberries, a Clif bar, and a protein shake. Sometimes she has Honey Nut Cheerios before or after school.

8:30am: I work at home all day in my pajamas, lunching on yogurt and berries with NuTrail Nut granola, microwaved popcorn, canned lentil soup, grapes, and whatever else I can scrounge.

7pm: We love the TV show Extracted, and we watch it while eating potluck leftovers for dinner. I house an enormous slice of pineapple carrot cake.

8:30am: Today’s food is nothing too crazy. Pineapple and carrot cake for breakfast, lentil soup for lunch, Triscuits and cheddar slices for an afternoon snack.

7:15pm: My best friend and I go to the movies once a week. We’ll see anything—we just love being out and immersed in a story.

For years, we’ve gone to the Alamo Drafthouse down the street and split a fried chicken sandwich and Cobb salad during the movie, but Sony acquired the Alamo, changed the menu, and fired most of the smart and interesting servers, replacing them with a phone QR code system that really f*cks with the escapist vibe. So we go instead to another movie theater to see The Drama. I eat an ice cream Snickers bar for dinner, which cost $5.94.

10:30pm: Back home, I devour more leftovers and more cake.

10am: They call Austin the “live music capital of the world,” but we also have an incredible literary community here, doing our best to fight the power (we’re tired).

I meet a writer friend at the Desnudo coffee truck to hear about her editor’s comments on her new manuscript. I treat us both: She gets a large iced white vanilla miso latte and I settle for black coffee. It comes to $15, including tip. Then I head home for my usual yogurt parfait.

7:30pm: Every month, I go to the One Page Salon at Radio Coffee, where I can eat a barbacoa taco from the Veracruz food truck ($6.50) and biscuit sandwiches from Briscuits food truck ($17.50 for a Brisket & Jelly, which marries sliced brisket with smoked strawberry jelly) and enjoy listening to brilliant writers read their stories aloud outdoors in the lush, Austin air. (Well, lush from February to April; after that it’s scorching and post-apocalyptic.) My daughter joins me today, as she often does, and gets a Pink Panther smoothie with guacamole and chips from Veracruz for $16.

8:30am: Working on my new novel, I consume three cups of black coffee; a big bowl of yogurt, berries, and granola; lentil soup; and microwave popcorn.

6pm: This week is my birthday! To celebrate, my husband and I go to one of my absolute favorite restaurants, Mattie’s at Green Pastures. (When invited, my daughter proclaimed, “There is nothing I want more than a frozen pizza and being alone.” Fair—and I can relate! We leave her at home.)

Housed in a gorgeously restored historic Victorian estate, the restaurant offers patio tables overlooking live oak trees, with peacocks roaming freely, emitting creepy cries. (My husband disagrees that the peacock cries are creepy.)

The menu is jazzed-up comfort food: Things start with a farmhouse salad containing the absolute freshest greens and sugar snap peas, plus honey-laden, mahogany-colored biscuits with an almost-but-not-quite burned crispy exterior. A hot mouthful delivers a rush of pleasure as powerful as a martini, I tell you.

Then come rainbow-hued carrots, wood-grilled until they are perfectly tender and tasting of caramel and fire, served over hummus with a crunch of chopped pistachios. Rounding out the starters are fried green tomatoes that make me realize I don’t actually hate fried green tomatoes.

For mains, my husband has the chicken fried steak special and I order what I always order: the best fried chicken in Texas, served over Kennebec mashers with gouda and bacon. (I didn’t touch the baby kale salad, but I’m sure it was great.)

For dessert, I order a cherry crumble with cashew sorbet and brown sugar oats. I keep saying to my husband, “No, you have a cherry,” and then, when he tries to take a bite, my hand instinctively swoops in and takes the one he’d angled toward. Look, he knows who he married.

Over the course of the meal, we’ve sipped through one Phony Negroni and two Topo Chicos.

On our way out, we chat with the valet, Langston, about the peacocks and the trees. I take a deep breath. For a moment, it feels as if everything in this crazy world is going to be OK. All for the bargain price of $195.99, including tip.

10am: We lounge around, eating leftovers, doing work (me), playing Crossplay on the New York Times app and planting aloe and filling bird feeders (my husband), and going to the mall (my daughter).

7pm: For dinner we order a thin-crust New York–style pizza, penne arrabbiata with shrimp, and a large spicy Caesar salad from Giovanni’s, an Italian takeout counter located inside the Chevron station down the street. When I go to pick up the pizza, I snag a lottery ticket for myself and one for the guy who sells it to me. I pay $41.22 in total.

At home, my daughter is making boxed brownies and they smell amazing.