Interview With Author Dianne Reeves Angel
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I’ve lived a wonderfully varied creative life — beginning in the Los Angeles film world of the 1980s, where the best stories were told not on the studio lot, but over long lunches, martinis, and late-night booth confessions. After years in film, television, and later in the business world, I finally sat down to write the stories I carried with me.
Every Restaurant Tells a Story – Tales of Film, Food, and Fabulous Misadventures, to be published next spring by Lost Telegram Press, is my debut novel — a collection of linked, character-driven stories set in the restaurants and hotels where life unfolded in glamorous, complicated, and unforgettable ways.
Off the page, I’m known as Auntie Mame to my nieces, nephews, and their children — slightly glamorous, always game for adventure, and happiest when stories and laughter are shared around a table.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
My debut novel is titled Every Restaurant Tells a Story – Tales of Film, Food, and Fabulous Misadventures, to be published next spring by Lost Telegram Press. The inspiration arrived last year while I was staying in Southern California and planning to meet an old friend — someone who has taken me to extraordinary restaurants around the world for over fifty years. As I thought about where we might meet in Los Angeles, I realized just how many remarkable meals I had shared during my years in the film industry — meals that carried not just flavor, but memory, friendship, ambition, heartbreak, reinvention, and joy.
I began writing from that place of sense memory — the clink of glasses, the perfume of a dining room, the way a single dish can summon an entire era — and soon discovered that each restaurant held a story. Those stories linked together to form this collection: an intimate, cinematic journey through the restaurants that shaped a life.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
Not really. I write longhand in a spiral notepad when I’m in Southern California — I take it to the beach and work on one chapter at a time, revising it over and over before I move on. When I’m in Tahoe, I scribble away on my trusty MacBook Pro, which is invariably full of cat hair.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
David Sedaris, Eve Babitz, Joan Didion, Colm Toibin, Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose), Jane Austin.
What are you working on now?
I’ve got a new fiction piece I’m working on – American Diplomats: Making Enemies on Every Continent. ’m currently working on American Diplomats – Making Enemies on Every Continent, a comedic travel memoir about the misadventures my husband and I seem to attract whenever we try to “travel like locals.” It’s a collection of stories about cultural misunderstandings, enthusiastic mistakes, and the way love and laughter can get you through almost anything. Think of it as diplomacy conducted with charm, questionable judgment, and a very dog-eared passport.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
I’m a novice. Hopefully, Awesome Gang will provide a solid platform for promoting my work. My publisher, Christopher Shoust, Lost Telegram Press, has been an answer to a prayer. He works tirelessly to promote his stable of authors.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Rewrite, rewrite, and rewrite again. Then share your work with a friend who genuinely believes in what you’re doing and will keep you motivated when you doubt yourself. My friends have been absolute saints — and I would not have finished this book without them.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
Funny you should ask – it’s contained in the final two sentence of my novel:
Never say no to a breath mint.
And never, ever let your auto insurance lapse.
Fade out.
What are you reading now?
The Editor, by Steven Rowley
What’s next for you as a writer?
I’m working with Christopher Shoust, publisher of Lost Telegram Press, to promote by current book, available in Spring 2026.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
The Norton Anthology of English Literature
The Norton Anthology of American Literature
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Anything by David Sedaris, cuz we all need to laugh!
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