I love Martha Stewart because she’s rich and powerful and a total high-brow snob. Who could aspire to be anything more? The woman has a fortune worth almost a billion, works tirelessly and is beautiful at 70 years old, without looking as puffy as a Cabbage Patch Doll from too much Restylane.
Martha’s only daughter, 46-year-old Alexis Stewart, has written a tell-all, Whateverland: Learning to Live Here. The book is full of stories about growing up in Martha’s cold shadow and dishes on the sort of advice her hard-working mama gave her as a child. (The “marry the rich, ugly guy and sleep around with a hot stud” advice is particularly sage). Here are my favourite quotes from the book:
“Martha does everything better! You can’t win!”
“If I didn’t do something perfectly, I had to do it again… I grew up with a glue gun pointed at my head.”
“Martha was not interested in being kid friendly.”
“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.'”
“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!'”
“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.”
“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?’
“My mother will occasionally complain that I don’t invite her over for dinner. But can you blame me? Because, sometimes this is what will happen: whatever I serve, she’ll sip it, taste it, make a face and push it away.”
“A woman who 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.”
“Martha always says she changes her sheets every day. But what she really means is that she has her sheets changed every day.”
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