I’m particularly interested in the idea advanced in Sophia Wiedeman’s piece on you and Katie Skelly for The Rumpus that your work is driven in part by Catholic guilt. Certainly your comics seem to revel in a rejection of Catholic mores, but more than that, they don’t smooth out the rough edges to make the violation more palatable, you know? The sex is, frankly, gross, and so is the food component, once that’s introduced in #foodporn.There’s not an attempt to play respectability politics with it.

Everything I make, every particle of my being, is based on how I grew up. Everything I make will of course be influenced by that. But to be honest, the reason I made #foodporn is because I had a crush on an ugly guy who made pizza at my local pizza joint. He is not attractive. When he was making the pizza I was attracted to him, though? I didn’t understand it and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I thought the concept of him getting hotter and hotter as he made the pizza was just hilarious. Hence the premise of the book.

Oh, just an interesting piece of side trivia – I finally did end up having sex with him, two days after #foodporn was released at MoCCA. I’ve stopped eating pizza since.

Typically when comics creators talk about essentially willing something from one of their comics into existence, it’s, like, Grant Morrison talking about tripping in Nepal or whatever and discovering the true nature of space-time. This is somewhat more relatable. But if it put you off pizza, then I wonder if in retrospect you’d have preferred it to have remained a fantasy.

Very interesting to me that you use the word “fantasy.” In March, I got out of an eight-year relationship. We had broken up and I moved out in 2012, but we ended up getting back together very quickly. But over the last year I had several crushes on people, especially this pizza guy, and I ended up making the comic about him. Things were just not working out with my ex, even though I loved him very much and he was family to me. I spent a lot of time fantasizing about “what life would be like” with certain other people, and this pizza guy was first in line. However, I didn’t make any moves about ending the relationship for almost a year after making the comic about him. My therapist had a real woman-to-woman conversation with me, knocked some sense into me, and suggested to me that my life might actually be greater on the other side of ending things with my ex, so I did it. For some reason at that moment it hit me that my life might be better with my ex not in it, which seemed almost unfathomable to me. She was right. So I guess one could say, therapist Sean, that maybe I avoided one of those painful Irish-Catholic illnesses or avoidance-of-feelings situations here? Perhaps history did not repeat itself, hmmm?

Luckily, things with this pizza guy fell into place — I got drunk at the pizza place and propositioned him — and we saw each other for a little while. It certainly served a purpose and helped me get through my breakup. I suddenly felt sexy again. He knew about my comic about him, and about #foodporn. He was aware I was doing some podcast interviews and being reviewed, and the comic about him was mentioned a few times. One night, in the midst of all this, he told me that he had gone to my website and looked at my comics, and told me, “Wow, I thought you were going to be much more famous than just this.” He also referenced myConancomic, in which there is a long sex scene between me and Conan O’Brien, while we were having sex one night, which I thought was hysterical, and which I am currently making a comic about now.

Anyway, this pizza guy was into Phish, and if anyone knows me they know I’m not into jam bands, so it just wasn’t meant to be — even though I continued to draw him and make comics about him while we were seeing each other. I guess I was just looking for anyone who wasn’t my ex and was fascinated by that. A few months after we started seeing each other, my friend Holly caught him arm in arm with another chick around the corner from my house. She went into the pizza place, which we frequented regularly, the next day and called him out in front of all of his coworkers. Needless to say, we haven’t really been back there since. So my ultimate curse is that I live half a block away from a pizza place that I love and can’t go to. So fantasy, shame on me I guess. All around, it’s been a fascinating chain of events for me to witness go down. And now I’ll have #foodporn to document it for the rest of my life, so “LOL,” I guess.

I interviewed Meghan Turbitt for “Say Hello!”, my Comics Journal column about up-and-coming cartoonists.