I I have to admit that I was a little surprised by the release of Stanley Tucci’s latest book. If I were to write on such a theme, the result would be as great as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa or a Victorian family Bible, suitable only for being wheeled around on a small cart. However, his attempt is externally quite a reasonable size, and when you open it, there is a lot of white space. Add to this the advisory subtitle “And Related Thoughts” (ah, so there’s some general pontification involved, as well as musings on breakfast, lunch and dinner) and, before you even start reading, the buffet starts to look a little decimated.

What I ate in one year is in the form of a diary. When the film opens in January 2023, Tucci, a Golden Globe and Emmy-winning actor, has just arrived in Rome for filming. Conclavea papal thriller based on the novel by Robert Harris. Already missing his wife and children, he ends up in a less than hospitable apartment hotel – an experience that, unfortunately, is an integral part of film life (though at least someone from production has stocked his kitchen with pasta, tomatoes from tin and new knives). But that doesn’t matter. On the plus side, there are his co-stars. One of these is Isabella Rossellini, who takes him to a restaurant her mother, Ingrid Bergman, loved, where a plethora of nuns sing hymns to the guests as they eat. Another is Ralph Fiennes, with whom Tucci shares a preference for – these sensitive guys – the softer, less tannic red wines from the Italian north.

This would be a good start for any book. Isabella Rossellini! Ralph Fiennes! And immediately the reader is also reminded of Tucci’s special charm, which is not only due to his modesty and humor, but also to the fact that he so smoothly and wisely balances fame and normality (many famous actors, if not most, are unable – or unwilling – to perform this trick). He likes to travel by train; he eats alone in restaurants; he doesn’t expect any special treatment from waiters. It’s endearing to know that he always brings his own food on set, expecting the catering to be dishearteningly poor and his tastes usually being plain. Among the desires he describes in What I ate in one year is for a salad of dandelion leaves, a dish that reminds him of his youth, when the Italian immigrants from Westchester, New York, picked them up along the parkways leading to Manhattan (while Tucci now lives in West London, his American parents are of Italian descent).

But after this we are in a sharp downward spiral. Tucci has already written three best-selling food books, and my feeling at this point is that he has little left to say – at least on this subject. How many times do we have to hear how much he loves marinara sauce? Or artichokes? Or eggplant? There are only so many ways to say something is delicious. A lot of space in this section is devoted to eating in airport lounges and the (I assume) business class cabins of airplanes, and while these passages are very boring indeed, they aren’t even as yawn-inducing as the bits about security checks and delayed flights (personally, I’d only be inclined to read a five-and-a-half-page account of a return flight to Aspen if it were from a bona fide genius like Craig Brown or Geoff Dyer—and I’d still pour myself a drink first). Tucci has designed a range of cookware, which I think is fine, even if I’m not looking for a celebrity colander. But writing about it here makes it seem shabby, whatever his intentions.

There are occasional mentions of famous friends such as Jamie Dornan, Saoirse Ronan and Harry Styles (who apparently loves the poet Rilke), all coming over for dinner; Tucci and his brother-in-law, actor John Krasinski, are having a day away at Guy Ritchie’s mansion, and it looks like something out of Ritchie’s (terrible) Netflix series, Gentlemen. But he’s always clam-ish about other people. In June he dines at the River Cafe in London with Colin Firth and Tom Ford. “What we talked about is none of your business,” he writes, which strikes me as a somewhat bracing approach to reader relations. If you’re not willing to invade someone’s privacy, why bother publishing a diary at all? Obviously, I think I know the answer to this question (and you probably do too). But as someone who has been writing for her entire life for over twenty years, I have to squeeze a little lemon here. The impulses that this book carries on all sides seem depressingly cynical to me, because it is thinner than freshly rolled fettuccine.