I think I was starving my whole childhood.

I was born in Brooklyn in 1948, the younger child of parents from immigrant Russian Jewish families who had met as counsellors at a summer camp. (She has an older brother named Ken.) My father was a surgeon. My mother was a trained a dietitian, and her attitude toward food shadowed my childhood. 

My mother was “obsessed with what she ate,” It was all about nutrition rather than pleasure. She didn’t understand pleasure and as a rule did not serve carbohydrates or dessert. After my father had a heart attack in his forties, cholesterol became forbidden, including cream for coffee. Only skim milk. You might as well pour water in your coffee. 

Our family moved to Connecticut when I was five, and though their life appeared to be a model of mid-century suburban prosperity, I experienced it differently. I remember being terrified of my father. My mother maintained a rigid sense of order to avoid my father’s “temper tantrums”—when he’d scream and hit his children. He would just have a rage, where he would drag me around the house by my hair. He never sexually abused me, but he had this love-hate relationship with me. I think he loved me, but he wanted me to be who he wanted me to be, without any consciousness of who I am. At home, I holed up in my room, but at school I let the real me shine. As a teen-ager, I resolved never to date any boy who raised his voice to her.

 My truly life began with Jeffrey. We met in 1964, when he spotted me through a library window at Dartmouth, where he was a freshman and I was visiting my brother, Ken, a sophomore. I was sixteen, wearing blue Pappagallo flats bought with my own money and a blue ribbon in my hair.

 Jeffery later told me that he could tell by looking at me that she was really smart. I was talking to two people, and he could see the expression on my face. He described it as incredibly alert, even as I was laughing.” 

Our relationship developed in letters and on weekend trips. We married when I was twenty and a junior at Syracuse University. In the course of the next decade, I transferred to North Carolina State University and worked a series of short-term jobs; Jeffrey proceeded to the military, to graduate school in international studies, and then to the State Department, where he worked for Henry Kissinger. 

My fans know Jeffrey as an uxorious husband who delights in roasted chicken and literally everything else his wife prepares. Our romance has become part of my persona. But, of course, no actual relationship is so easy. My book’s account of a brief separation in the late seventies might surprise some of my readers. Our early dynamic—with Jeffrey as the designated adult—made sense at first, but over time our roles began to chafe, especially amid the broader reconsideration of marriage taking place in the nineteen-seventies. It started to piss me off that I was the only one who made dinner. Our reconciliation involved recognizing that they’d both be happier with more independence.

 In the mid-eighties, just as I opened my store in East Hampton and moved there full time, Jeffrey spent two years in Tokyo, overseeing Lehman Brothers’ investment banking in Asia, followed by a year in Hong Kong. By the nineties, “navigating unusual situations was ‘normal’ for us.

 In an episode of “30 Rock,” Liz Lemon heralds me as “that woman on the Food Network whose husband only comes home on the weekends, and she spends the rest of the time eating and drinking with her gay friends.” Though marriage saved me from a cold, distant upbringing, it has proven to be remote in another way.

We did not make an explicit choice against parenthood; it was more that parenthood always seemed out of the question to me. I remember thinking very clearly, I don’t know why people have children. I just thought, “Why would you re-create that?” I would be terrified to repeat my childhood. In the early years, Jeffrey would periodically ask whether they should talk about having kids, and I’d demur. And then, at some point, we just didn’t talk about it anymore.