A Recipe For More

Sara Elise’s debut book A Recipe For More (Harper Collins, 2023) explores the ideas of abundance, pleasure, and self-expansion through examining our connection to concepts like self-inflicted suffering, toxic positivity, rest, rage, visibility, agency, and more.

A Recipe for More video collaboration with Mala Forever Production


What can you imagine your life to be?

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What can you imagine your life to be? 〰️

"Each new day is a singular moment, a singular opportunity. No day is like the last and no day is like what’s to come. We have arrived, and we are simultaneously arriving.”  

In this expansive debut, A Recipe for More: Choosing a Life of Pleasure and Abundance, creative, host, and "pleasure doula" Sara Elise offers a profound and challenging inquiry into the forces that keep us in a state of survival and limitation and asks us to consider a new way to live. Sara Elise leaves us with what it means to be present to what’s unfolding around us and open to the change that is possible in that empty space.

A Recipe for More is a quest to examine the ingredients of our lives, those essential components that make up our days. Have we chosen rest, breath, movement, agency, visibility, play, and pleasure? Or are we trapped in the numbing and violent pattern of self-inflicted suffering? Do we celebrate the unique and precious wiring of our brains? Are our relationships a garden of ever-growing and evolving roots? Do we nourish our bodies with what it requires to sense and receive? Are we liberated, awakened, and alive? In the tradition of Adrienne Maree Brown and Sonya Renee Taylor, A Recipe for More is a radical argument for dismantling the systems that oppress us. But it begins with the individual, and the simple recipe of our every day. 

Groundbreaking, persuasive, inclusive, and warm, A Recipe for More brings the ingredients of an abundant life to all readers so that we might honor ourselves, deepen our communities, and finally be present in each miraculous and life-giving singular moment.

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What Are People Saying About A Recipe for More?

Sara Elise has much to share about leaning into the sensate pleasures of aliveness, the fecund richness of possibility that blooms when mapping out desire paths towards a Black queer futurity that prioritizes self-worth, collectivity, non-hierarchical mindsets, access needs, care, healing and ecological harmony. She does all of this with grace and transparency, seeding the ground for anyone who wishes to take inspiration and turn it into action. This is more than a book: It’s a way of being.
—  J. Wortham, culture writer for the New York Times Magazine and co-host of the New York Times podcast, Still Processing
Deeply honest, compassionate, and wise...A Recipe for More is a generous book about breaking cycles of suffering, but also, choosing pleasure, offering kindness to self, cultivating an electric network of friendships, and embracing this sweet life. I treasured every page.
— Janelle Monáe, singer, actor, artist, and New York Times bestselling author of The Memory Librarian
 

Recent Press for A Recipe For More

Publishers Weekly “An Empowering Debut”

The Griot “The Perfect Read for Mental Health Awareness Month”

Found Family Podcast feature “A Recipe for Abundance and Radical Hospitality in Your Everyday Life feat. Sara Elise”

ESSENCE “Sara Elise Left a Career in Investment Banking to Help Others Live a Life of Ease”

IG Live with Well Read Black Girl

IG Live with adrienne marie brown

This is How We Care Podcast feature “Embracing Abundance & Redefining Success with Sara Elise”

Autostraddle “Sara Elise Asks…Who Do You Want to Become?”

Real mental health resources app “Getting Real with Sara Elise”

California Institute of Integral Studies Podcast feature: “The Ingredients for Everyday Abundance and Ease”