Author Kate Jacobs is clearly a metaphorical thinker. Her first novel, the bestselling The Friday Night Knitting Club, used knitting as a metaphor for female friendships. It told the story of the entwined lives of members of a New York knitting club who gathered at single mother Georgia Walker's yarn shop, and used the craft to highlight the tension some of the characters feel between feminism and domesticity.

Her latest novel, Comfort Food, features cooking show host Gus Simpson who has "a lot on her plate." Jacobs describes the main character's journey in hunger-inducing terms: "You have to learn to eat everything on your plate. You have to learn to savour the different tastes on your plate. How does this character go from saying she has this emotionally overloaded plate to taking what life is giving her and putting together an emotionally nourishing meal?"

"I was thinking about what brings a family together and what pulls them apart, which brings me to thinking about dinner: the cooking, and the sitting around a kitchen table."

Currently settled in southern California but originally from Hope, British Columbia –- a plate's throw from my Vancouver home –- Jacobs laughed that she could speak Canadian with me, referring to grade one instead of first grade and talking about wool as a generic term for not-necessarily-sheep-based yarn, things I hadn't even realized were Canadianisms. She also gives the funniest example I've heard about the difference between the two countries: "Canadians ask about the weather, and they really want to know how the weather is." I wish that were a metaphor, but our obsession with weather is a literal truth.

Unlike The Friday Night Knitting Club, which gathered its mostly unrelated characters in "a family of choice," Comfort Food is literally about family dynamics, with "two daughters and their mother going through this dance of redefinition," said Jacobs. "The daughters want their mother to recognize them as adults instead of just children. And the main character, Gus, is realizing she needs to be seen by her daughters as so much more than their mother."

"It's much more about work in a way that Friday Night Knitting Club isn't, even though they spent a lot of time in the yarn shop," Jacobs explained as the core difference between her two novels. "This is more about career, and what are you willing to do for your career. That's a question more than one character finds themselves asking in Comfort Food."

"Our work lives, that's where we spend the bulk of our day and it's very significant," she continued. "We all have goals and ambitions, but those can change over time, and what you're willing to do to achieve them can change over time. The characters are looking at that."