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When I’m working on a novel, I always take my characters shopping. I like to push a shopping cart through the supermarket and think about what my character is going to buy. I find that the best way to understand a character well enough to embody them on paper.

I need to know if my character is shopping for convenience or comfort. Whether they’re buying ingredients for elaborate recipes or frozen ready meals. I usually take them to the supermarket when I’m about a quarter of the way through the first draft. By this point, I know my character’s mood, their internal state, and I’m working out the details of their life: their job, their home, their habits. A trip to the supermarket can break some of these pieces open.

For my new novel Trust herI found out that Tessa cooks to have control and order as the threats around her increase. She is an ambitious, driven cook. Her sister Marian finds cooking boring and restrictive. Finding out this dynamic between them has brought up so many other tensions in their relationship as sisters.

Some of this supermarket research never makes it onto paper. For example, I know that Eamonn’s fridge is empty except for beer and sauce packets from previous takeout orders. This isn’t particularly relevant to the story, but it gives me the confidence to describe his dialogue and actions.

At the supermarket, people are a little vulnerable: They may be tired or hungry, stopping by on their way home after a long day at work. They may be worried about prices. They may be caregivers, carefully choosing food that someone else will eat. They may be optimists, happily buying vegetables that are guaranteed to wilt before anyone cooks them. They may choose their food in a fit of nostalgia, depression or restlessness.

One of my top ten fictional supermarket scenes comes from The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld. In the first chapter, Viv stops at a supermarket in Musselburgh on the coast of Scotland: “I walk along, trying to think of something new and interesting to cook, but by the time I reach the frozen food section, I’ve got spaghetti, tomatoes and tinned mussels. A carton of eggs I’ll never use, and some sliced ​​brown bread and the herbs. None of this is something I want to eat tonight. But at least it’s food that suggests some seriousness.” And there we have her, our protagonist, a woman full of frustration and longing, painfully real.

TWe Three by Ore Agbaje-Williams begins with these lines: “Temi comes by at twelve. She brings the wine and kettle chips I asked her to bring, and a pack of cigarettes.” I remember reading these lines in a bookstore and being immediately enchanted: I would go with Temi wherever she wanted.

I love it when characters are also seduced by food, when certain dishes and drinks color an affair. In The woman upstairs by Claire Messud, Nora’s obsession with Sirena, Skandar and their son Reza is marked by the “extraordinary” food they serve when she comes over for dinner: “bowls of lamb stew on rice, fatty and spicy and aromatic,” with cumin and currants. Their dinner is indelible, part of the romance.

In Homefire by Kamila Shamsie, a crucial scene takes place between two lovers who pit and eat cherries together, staining their hands and clothes in the process. The simplicity of the food makes the dramatic course of their conversation even more disturbing.

So often, food appears on the page in a moment of tension or reversal: on the table at a first meeting, on the table at a wedding or funeral, eaten alone on the sofa after receiving bad news.

It also determines the season and the landscape. I like reading about summer dishes – watermelon, dan dan noodles with cold cucumber, chilled retsina – and winter dishes – fondue, mulled wine, raclette.

I can’t always travel to or return to all the landscapes in my book, but I can probably cook dishes from those places. Learning about and eating Irish food was one of my favorite parts of writing: barmbrack, wild blackberries, Dublin Bay prawns, kelp, carrageenan moss pudding. It connected me to my characters and the atmosphere of the book.

So let’s say you’re in a supermarket soon. The automatic doors open. Let’s imagine that the person watching the doors open is actually your character. They’ve come straight from the last scene you wrote. What state of mind are they in?

Is she hungry?

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Trust her by Flynn Berry is now available from Viking.