Holy crow. When I first heard that the book didn’t exactly show Martha in a favorable light, I automatically thought, “What, did she forget the pretty crinoline bows on the Christmas presents that one year,” and “Aw, it must have been terrible growing up with America’s craftiest, homiest mom, word.” But then? I actually read some excerpts from the book, and guys? It totally blew all of my predispositions about Martha’s child-rearing away. From the book Whateverland: Learning to Live Here, written by Martha’s only daughter, Alexis Stewart, and her radio show co-host, Jennifer Koppelman Hutt, the bathroom habits Martha engaged in:
“Mother always peed with the door open. I remember saying, ‘You know, now I have friends over! You can’t do that anymore! It’s gotta stop! My friends’ parents don’t do it! Give me a break here! I don’t feel like being embarrassed! It’s exhausting! I’m a kid! Stop!’”
And then on her pet hygiene:
“My mother has a sign on all of her doors to take your shoes off. For god’s sake! My mother’s dogs piss and shit on her rugs and she’s telling people to take their shoes off?”
Um. Alexis on holidays around the Stewart abode, and how they weren’t what you thought they’d be:
“She used to make me wrap my own presents. She would hand me things right before Christmas and say, ‘Now wrap these but don’t look inside. [Halloween wasn't much better.] There were no costumes. There was no anything. We turned off all the lights and pretended we weren’t home.”
Alexis on the culinary queen’s cooking skills:
“There was never anything to eat at my house. Other people had food. I had no food … There were ingredients but no prepared food of any kind.”
And finally, Martha’s only daughter, her own flesh and blood, says about Martha’s grandparenting preference:
“A woman lived near us when I was little had married someone very wealthy and very unattractive, and my mother actually told me when I was a small child, ‘Now Alexis, if this ever happens, you make sure you have sex with somebody else to have their baby. Don’t have his baby.’ She was very practical about it. It was a survival skill – you have someone rich and ugly who takes care of you, and you have someone who’s hot and makes attractive babies.”
The, um, book comes out October 18th. Are you guys going to read it, or would you rather your high opinion of America’s Domestic Goddess not be tainted any more than it already has been?
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