GIRL, SO CONFUSING

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Well, it’s time. Let’s talk Martha, and Ina.

Recently, I found myself watching an episode of Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen across five or so Tik Toks, my phone illuminating my dark bedroom. Crowded into that weird, low-ceilinged little room where they film WWHL was Cohen, Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg. And Seth Meyers, for some reason, contributing very little. 

Cohen, ever the messy girl, asked Stewart very pointedly if she’d read Garten’s new memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens. “I’ve read parts of it,” replied Stewart, quite cuntily. Cohen kept digging. “You’ve read the part about your … self?”

“Oh, yes.” 

As Cohen and Stewart lock eyes, you can hear Snoop in the background, earnestly confused. “What do it say? I haven’t read the book I need to know, what do it say?” 

“She can write whatever she wants,” says Martha. A nervous laughter permeates, which you remember is Seth Meyers—lol. Cohen presses the point, reminding the audience (and Snoop) that Ina claims the two fell out of touch when Stewart moved to Bedford, NY (Cohen erroneously says Connecticut during the segment), which Martha flatly denies. “That’s not true,” she says with a click of her tongue, as Snoop Dogg shakes his head. “Martha don’t fall out with people.” Cohen prompts Martha, and she says it aloud: “after I went to jail.” Because God is real, they do one momentary wide shot to remind you that Seth Meyers is sitting between them, hands cradling his knees, wide-eyed and nodding. 

It all feels very incendiary. Of course, Martha gave the same comments to the New Yorker a month prior. 

In Garten’s telling, she and Martha Stewart lost touch after Stewart began spending more time at a new property in Bedford, New York. Stewart recalled a sharper break, after her conviction related to an insider-trading scandal. “When I was sent off to Alderson Prison, she stopped talking to me,” Stewart told me. “I found that extremely distressing and extremely unfriendly.” (Garten firmly denies this.) Shortly after I got off the phone with Stewart, I received a call from Susan Magrino, her longtime publicist and friend. Magrino wanted to clarify that Stewart was “not bitter at all and there’s no feud.”

When the WWHL segment came to my attention, I had already started Ina’s Memoir and was eagerly anticipating the release of Martha. These are two very important women in my food education and therefore my life. During my Dark Period, I produced ten different Martha drafts that I hoped would be my return to the newsletter, segments of which can be found here. Before the clashing promotional schedules for their respective memoir products brought it to the forefront, I was aware of the powder keg between these women I so admired. I’m sure you remember Ina’s gigantic quarantine cosmo, but do you remember that Martha commented on it? She called it “not charming”—those are fighting words in Connecticut! 

So, can they work it out on the remix? 

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When I was very young, I used to sit at the foot of my Mother’s bed and watch cooking shows on her little TV. I loved the classic hosts: Alton Brown, Giada De Laurentiis, Rachael Ray, Sandra Lee, Emeril (longtime listeners will remember that this newsletter used to be named after him), Ina Garten, etc. And then there was Martha Stewart. I used to sit there, curled up about two feet away from the television, taking extensive mental notes as Martha would hollow out pumpkins to make soup tureens. I felt with every fiber of my being that this was critical info, that my whole life would be a test on this material. 

And you know what, I wasn’t wrong. 

I watched Barefoot Contessa, but something about Ina Garten’s nonchalance, her joie de vivre, really unsettled me. I hadn’t quite titrated my own neuroses yet and I just didn’t really get what Garten was trying to show me. Running my niece’s birthday party like the Navy? That I understood. But who was Jeffrey and why was he so hungry? 

At the time—and perhaps still—the conventional wisdom was that you were either an Ina or a Martha. I always felt I was a Martha, but as I got older I came to see Ina’s vision. I got her and Jeffrey. Perhaps I was a Martha Sun with an Ina Moon. Now, I understand that they are two sides of the same coin. 

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Let’s start with Martha Kostyra and Ina Rosenberg. 

I’ve spent a lot of time researching Martha Kostyra over the past few years. An August Leo born in Jersey City in 1941 and the eldest daughter of a large Polish Catholic family, Martha has frequently told the story of a bootstrapping childhood where she grew vegetables and learned to sew and cook. And of course, she modeled. Something that didn’t make it into the documentary is that Martha babysat for Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra, her Nutley, NJ neighbors, and developed a small book of business as a sort of vibe curator for wealthy childrens’ birthday parties. Documentary viewers will know that she paid her way through Barnard with her modeling work (not mentioning her work as a maid, which I guess doesn’t fit the fabu narrative quite as well) but might not know that she turned down a full ride to NYU to do so. That’s what we call a Reverse Gossip Girl! 

But before I dove into the memoir, I didn’t really know anything about Ina Rosenberg. I was excited to learn more. If you’ve read the book, however, you might already know that Ina Rosenberg is sort of a footnote. 

(I’ll just say, before I continue, that I know people are being weird about last names these days. I wasn’t under the pretense that the neés Kostyra and Rosenberg were anymore an authentic version of these women then Stewart and Garten, I just simply wanted to understand more about how two of the most quintessential modern homemakers saw themselves before they had a home to make.)

I listened to Be Ready When the Luck Happens on audiobook, narrated by Ina herself, in a way I felt fit the subject matter. I’d get a fabulous coffee and pastry from one of my many haunts and walk with Ina down the canal, circling Victoria Park during some of the most beautiful days of this London autumn. I watched Martha (a few times) while doing my most Martha task: ironing my bedding. Everyone I’ve dated has made fun of my insistence on crisp percale, but no one ever complains about sleeping in my bed! Neither the memoir nor the documentary necessarily dwelled on their childhoods, but there were some real revelations and, taking them together, it’s hard not to see the commonalities. 

Ina Rosenberg is seven years younger than Stewart, a February Aquarius born to Russian Jewish parents in Brooklyn, moving to Stamford, Connecticut when she was five. She was the baby of a classic, four-person, older brother/younger sister household. 

Some of us, born to be the baby of a four-top but who, through divorce and remarriage, became the eldest daughter of six, nodded their heads sagely. 

Both Martha and Ina describe their fathers in similar ways, as these handsome, stylish gregarious men. And then they both let the other shoe drop, that the men they’ve each been describing as “difficult” in their interviews over the years weren’t just difficult, they were abusive. That their respective childhoods were not just cold, they were unhappy, that they had long tails in terms of their lives and relationships. Ina’s parental abuse and neglect are threaded throughout the entire memoir as the pervasive doubts in her head. She names her parents as the reason she never wanted to have children of her own. Martha is a bit less explicit. “I grew up in a very uncomfortable house,” says her daughter Alexis, “I’ve learned to suppress most of my emotions.” 

Both got married while still undergraduates, Martha a month shy of twenty and Ina two months shy of twenty-one. Both married men they described as serious. I was expecting Ina to describe her marriage as she did, as the impetus for her life to truly begin, but I was surprised to hear that Martha did as well. Both tell us about their extended European honeymoons, although we can guess that the Stewart’s was better-financed. Ina describes hers as some of the best times of her life: her and Jeffrey sweltering in a tent and happily eating beans across French campsites. Martha’s gives us a window into the couple’s inevitable split: a disinterested husband leaving her alone to wind up kissing handsome strangers in Italian cathedrals. But both women describe their trips as life-changing, eye-opening culinary experiences. It’s easy for me to picture each one, in some fabulous little travel outfit, having their own Dionysian moment of ecstasy trying European produce for the first time. And then they both settled into their respective, frankly very similar lives. They both donned heels and ‘hose and went to work in conventionally masculine fields, and after-hours they both threw themselves into their homes. Were they pursuing domestic bliss, or were they both young women who finally had a shred of agency over their own lives, and their homes were the site of it? 

And then they both got bored! In 1976, a 35-year old Martha started a catering company; a year after that, she catered a book party for her husband and enraptured the head of Crown Publishing so much that he contacted her about doing a cookbook. The next year, a 30-year old Ina saw a little ad in the New York Times advertising a gourmet foods store for sale in Westhampton, New York. From there, both careers took off in that sort of fabulous way they used to when the coke was free-flowing and rent was one-hundred dollars. And both marriages suffered. 

Up until this point in the memoir, I’d been listening to much of the story of Jeffrey and Ina with that little wince that often comes with hearing an older woman tell you about her amazing husband. Ina would tell an anecdote of her stressing about something and Jeffrey telling her “don’t be such a girl!” and then in the next chapter she’d say that Jeffrey was the first male feminist. Okay! But it wasn’t really the anecdotes that were bothering me, or the mounting evidence of Jeffrey’s uh, ties to the US intelligence apparatus. No, it was the recurring concept that Jeffrey “raised” Ina. Whew. She just kept saying it! And then, when you feel like you can’t hear her say it one more time, Ina starts raising herself. 

Ina’s treatment of her separation is one of the most interesting aspects of the entire book. She had grown to feel suffocated by the traditional marriage arrangement and was increasingly aware of the power imbalance between her and her husband. So she asked him for time apart and he said yes. And she told him he had to go to therapy in the meantime! The couple met up at the beach and, amazingly, Ina told her husband, a man born in 1946, that she wasn’t interested in a traditional marriage and she didn’t want to do all the cooking etc and she wanted independence and her own career and he was like absolutely, let’s do it. 

But while Ina repeatedly does that reflexive thing people pleasers do where in the leadup to the separation she’s like, and I’m sure I was being a very inattentive wife to Jeffrey and I’m sure he was feeling left out, there isn’t much evidence to the reader that it was ever the case. In terms of what he actually says and does and how their relationship moves forward, one gets the distinct impression that Jeffrey Garten really didn’t mind. 

Okay, let me just take a break here to say that Jeffrey Garten is a spook. Or I’d eat my hat! 

Anyways, the spook and the homemaker, both of them landlords to boot, made a truly modern marriage of equals for themselves. And Ina actually has what Liz Lemon describes her life as on 30 Rock, “whose husband only comes home on the weekends and she spends the rest of the time eating and drinking with her gay friends.”

If there’s one takeaway from Be Ready When the Luck Happens, it’s that Ina loves Jeffrey and Jeffrey loves Ina in a way that is really just nice. And I do get what Ina means when she says Jeffrey raised her, even if it makes my eye twitch. It reminded me of what a common marriage dynamic this used to be (and may still be) for young women who sought independence from their families via one of the only available means. Jeffrey’s tenderness with Ina feels rare, but I do wonder how many men might have surprised their wives, given the opportunity, that they also weren’t interested in the traditional patriarchal role of Husband. That’s not to blame women who never sought an alternative to the assumed dynamic within marriage, but merely to say that it’s quite remarkable for a young woman from Ina’s background to have done so, both a testament to her own fortitude (which I don’t think she credits herself for enough) and to Jeffrey’s decade of kindness that built her up. 

Uh oh, it’s time for the contrast section of this compare and contrast. 

Andrew Stewart is no Jeffrey Garten, we can safely assume that. The Stewart marriage falls apart five years after her first book, the canonical text Entertaining, as she’s beginning the press tour for her fifth book, the poorly-timed Weddings. In the documentary, those around her tell of Martha’s stress about how her separation would be perceived, especially while promoting a wedding book. They say that no one ended up caring, which might be true in the broad public sense, but if you read basically any of the feature-length articles about Stewart for the next twenty years, you’ll find that some people cared a great deal. 

“It’s a schedule most mortals would have a tough time keeping up with. Which may be why her husband of 27 years, whom she has frequently called “my best friend,” threw in the towel.” (Susan Puckett, 1989)

Would Ina be who she is now, had her and Jeffrey fallen apart? Would Martha be Martha had she and Andrew stayed married? We can’t know, but I say not. They’d still be fabulous, of course, but it’s hard not to see their trajectories in the context of both women trying to carve out space for themselves within the confines of traditional marriage at a time when things like the Equal Credit Opportunity Act were still quite new. 

The Martha of the documentary takes a fairly cool approach to her divorce, making a direct plea to women everywhere to dump their cheating husbands. She’s flippant about her own indiscretions. But when their divorce was fresh, it was handled like many famous person divorces, through a war of surrogacy. Sources close to Martha would say that she was crushed and sources close to Andrew would say that he had felt belittled by her. Reading between the lines, my own analysis is that it’s hard—I’m told—to be the partner of a Fabulous Grade-A Bitch and not everyone has that dawg in them. I’ve been the Bitch with the Nice Boyfriend before, I get it! 

So there’s their marriages. And then of course, one of them goes to jail. 

When I think of Martha and Ina, a lot of references come to mind. Betty Draper’s Around-the-World dinner party in Mad Men. Desperate Housewives’ Bree Hodge, neé Van de Kamp. Miss Piggy. Martha playing Martha on Ugly Betty! And, if I may, Swede Levov, of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. 

Look, you can’t do a deep dive into two women, born in Jersey and Brooklyn, Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish, in the forties, and not go a little Roth mode. These are great American characters! 

Never in his life had he occasion to ask himself, “Why are things the way they are?” Why should he bother, when the way they were was so perfect?

(Philip Roth, American Pastoral)

Both Martha and Ina have achieved their own perfection. Martha’s, at one point, came crashing all the way down. 

I remember watching Martha go to jail. I remember bristling at the joke it seemed to be on TV. I remember the poncho, oh the poncho, upon her release. The most shocking revelation within Martha was her account of being placed in solitary confinement—which is torture—as a punishment. I felt that in my eight-year old heart. 

It’s easy to see Martha as Swede Levov, the flaxen-haired golden child whose American Dream collapses into the American Berserk. But this is where I see these two women as twin flames, only Ina’s is never met with the shock of a bucket of water poured over top. It’s luck, as Ina might put it, that her life only kept getting more fabulous as another’s didn’t. Happenstance that she invested in real estate rather than stocks, that nothing ever came to a screeching halt as it sometimes does for wealthy people who lead wealthy lives. I feel fairly certain that Ina, like many other people, stopped talking to Martha when she went to prison. I also feel fairly certain that Ina, like many other people, is sure that’s not why they stopped talking, that it was something else, that things just got really hectic in 2004. I noticed the way Ina writes about Martha in her memoir, in the sort of passing-yet-significant way you talk about a lost friend who you miss. She is sure to point out that Martha played a major role in her first book deal and mentions her own column in Martha Stewart Living (she does not mention that the very first print issue of MSL features The Barefoot Contessa, but coverage of the book does). 

While I’ve been turning to these women as I figure out my career, my love life, my tablescape, I found myself struck by their own accounts of lost friends over the years. It was a very Girl, So Confusing year in my own life, as the late twenties forced a lot of us to renegotiate—and reaffirm, in most cases—our relationships to each other. A few months ago, I was having a really tough conversation with a friend and this wasn’t the breaking point at all, but part of it was this sob story about how they had tried to bring a dish to my dinner party and had burnt it and I didn’t say anything, but in my mind I was like, I said don’t bring a dish! 

I do think Martha and Ina could reconnect, if they so wished. But I think the issue goes back further than Martha’s incarceration. Both in the book and in interviews throughout her life, Ina defines herself relative to Martha. She had to! Everyone seemed to be asking her about it. Recall, are you a Martha or an Ina? Ina often says, after the appropriate amount of deference to Martha given, that she’s a bit simpler than her counterpart, a bit more accessible. On first read, that feels a bit … cunty. But now that I’ve had her in my headphones for two consecutive listens, I see things a little clearer. From an outside perspective, Ina Garten’s life is no less perfect, no less unobtainable than Martha’s. In many ways, it’s more. But Ina’s life is also plagued by self-doubt, instilled in her young. When she says she’s more accessible than Martha Stewart what she really means is that she thinks of herself as a regular-degular person and Martha Stewart as Martha Stewart. That’s not fair to either of them. And I wish I could hang out with Ina Garten for so many reasons, but chiefly so that I could be the older sister to a 76-year old woman for just a moment and be like bitch, you’re Ina Garten! 

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I’ve been thinking about Influencer-dom a lot this week. One of the most cloying post-Trump victory postmortems has been the “oh, all my favorite influencers are Conservatives?” one. Duh! 

They never got me on the tradwife stuff. As you know by now, I climb into my ironed sheets at the end of a long day and I type “Ross Poldark I Bet on Losing Dogs edit” into the little Tik Tok search bar. But this week I have been served a lot of content about how if you’re shocked that such and such of your favorite influencers voted for Trump, you’re not following the right influencers. And sure, but I just have to ask one question. 

Is there not possibly a through line between the concept of a “favorite influencer” and Donald Trump being President? Like if I said, what’s your favorite billboard? What’s your comfort commercial? I’m not even implying causation, I’m just asking if it makes sense that we got in the right ballpark for President TV to start dinging homers. 

A theme is emerging from the coverage of Martha, that Stewart was “the original influencer.” And while I largely disagree, I can’t overlook Martha’s—and Ina’s—influence on influencing. Now, it seems every house in the Hamptons has their own private chef who documents every second of their cooking on Tik Tok. Every fabulous dinner party is an opportunity for behind-the-scenes content about how you host a fabulous dinner party. It all fits within the narrative we’ve been force fed for the last few years, that influencing has “democratized” traditional media. 

I read this, as I was writing, which is an interesting look at influencer as an identity. 

This is an industry that has completely turned the traditional advertising and media landscape on its head and democratized who gets an audience, who gets one’s attention, who gets to dictate purchasing power.

I appreciate that this is a genuinely-held belief, and one that a lot of influencers share, but can we be real for a second? There are several issues, but perhaps the most dangerous is the muddying of advertising/media/storytelling under the penumbra of “content creation.” It’s a direct result of how “creators” monetize their work. If you’re, say, making a beautiful, identity-forward video about your dinner with friends, but it’s sponsored by Sézane, it’s an ad. I’m sure it’s a really beautiful ad, but it’s an ad. #Ad! I’m so, so bored of this idea that influencing “democratizes” media. What media? Wirecutter? 

And then of course, we have to ask if that’s really even true. If it were true, if influencing was this great equalizer, wouldn’t we see that reflected in reality? 

But as is often the case, you can kinda just say stuff. And so Martha has been democratized. Uncountable influencers have taken her place. They’re not on a pedestal, they’re in your phone! They’re offering you a much more authentic, much more accessible version of a fabulous life, but in this one you can drink a (diet) cokey cola and the details of it are all linked in their Amazon Storefront. 

In her own fabulous Martha essay, Alicia Kennedy suggests:

In the current fragmented media landscape, there’s no one doyenne of domesticity who reigns. Everyone chooses their own favorites in the parasocial olympics, and so to understand the kitchen in the U.S., we keep looking back. Maybe we need to look at each other, talk to each other, cook with each other—look sideways, not up. How can we harness the power of domesticity for a better future? This is the question that I need to keep top of mind right now. Martha reminded me.

And this, to me, is what Martha and Ina have always represented. I wasn’t sitting at the foot of my Mother’s bed taking mental notes on soup tureens because I was planning on leveraging my asset portfolio to one day live in Easthampton. What these women showed me was that it’s possible to live a life where your home is an extension of yourself, and you get to share it with people you love. That if you adore someone, it’s a good thing to take the time to give them a bit of razzle dazzle. 

Jaya Saxena, in hosting her own Entertaining party for Eater (the Martha doc spurred some really tremendous essays this month), begins to understand the allure of Stewart, who by her own account never held much sway. 

I still don’t want a mansion or a staff, or to surround myself with titans of industry. What I do aspire to is the time and money to make the people in my life feel celebrated. And while I don’t need 60 handmade blini to do that, I was still struck by the joy in my friends’ faces when they saw not that I had made everything, but that I had made it for them. I cannot afford for this to be my life, and even if I had the money to quit my job I don’t think I’d spend each day planning Italian buffets and omelet parties. But what Stewart knows is that there are times when mere cooking should be elevated to entertaining. That’s what the money is for.

Whether you’re Martha-dubious or an OG precocious child, whether it took you time to get barefoot with the Contessa or you got it from the jump, I’d encourage you to fire up Youtube and watch a few minutes of food media from the Bush years. Then, flip through some cookbooks and call a few friends. Make them something fabulous. A grand gesture perhaps! It’ll be a good thing. 🫒