During her omnipresence in the 1990s, Martha Stewart never did it for me. Of course, I knew of her and was very aware of who she was, but I rarely engaged with her celebrity, being somewhat turned off by her caricatured fussiness, whiteness, and wealth. To me, she epitomized a starched, bland Stepford Wives aesthetic that I thought would be stultifying. Without really knowing of her work, I thought she was exceedingly tasteful, to the point of being antiseptic. Though I was a huge consumer of cooking TV, I never warmed to her oeuvre, assuming her schtick would be too complicated and unattainable. I preferred by celebrity chefs to be chatty, accessible, and fun, like Rachael Ray or even Ina Garten. Martha Stewart would glide across the television screen, her frozen beauty akin to the White Witch from C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, the Wardrobe. Her presence in my consumption of pop culture was minimal, someone I was aware of, someone I instantly recognized, but someone whose content I’d be hard pressed to describe.

After I moved to the UK in 2017, I became increasingly starved for American pop culture. This desire became even more desperate during the pandemic, during which I was furloughed for six months, out of work, trapped at home, and unable to focus on any creative or academic projects. Unlike other people in lockdown who took the time to master languages, learn to play instruments, or bake bread, I responded to the lockdown with torpor. I was unable to focus on anything, my brain wracked with a particularly disturbing cocktail of boredom, anxiety, fear, and distraction. Reading and writing became impossible. During this odd time – separated from the world – I started to turn to nostalgia, reaching back to American 90s culture, when things seemed at their simplest to me.

To access these easy memories, I would spend hours on YouTube. In these wasted hours, I scanned thumbnails for things that were familiar and warm – commercials, music videos, bootlegged 90s-era sitcoms, and clips of that decade’s talk shows. It was during these YouTube sessions that I found Martha Stewart. I stumbled upon libraries of clips and videos of her various cooking shows, talk shows, specials, and TV appearances. Clicking on a few of these videos, I assumed that watching them would give me a hearty laugh at her expense, the silly rich lady teaching some morning talk-show host how to assemble a six-tiered wedding cake in fifteen minutes.

Slowly, I found myself looking for more of her videos, finding a growing interest in the ambitious crafts that she would show her audiences. I would idly watch her lay out an elaborate tablescape or wonder how that turkey she pulled out of the oven came out that perfect shade of gold. I realized I seriously misjudged the woman. Instead of finding a stuffy, uptight fussbudget, I met a serene, placid pro who handled herself with a near-perfect grace.

So, Stewart lodged herself in my brain, becoming part of a large crowd of trivial pop culture celebrities that occupy the Hollywood Squares that is my brain. I wouldn’t call myself a fan – not yet – but I would watch one five-minute clip a day. I didn’t buy any of her books or magazines nor did I seek out any of her other merchandise. She was just one of many other cooks I would watch passively.

After the lockdown, came a period of instability in the UK, as the government struggled to balance safety with the collective loss of patience of the public. Despite being promised to the contrary, Christmas was cancelled, and we went through a series of tiered lockdowns. During this time, on a cold February night, I was trying to navigate the staircase at the Embankment station on the Underground, and my feed got tangled with my bags, and I tripped, falling down the flight of stairs, landing in an ugly heap at the bottom. I was with my partner, who panic-stricken, raced down to help me, as members of the public gathered around me in concern, many asking if I was OK. I sat up in varying amounts of pain, depending how I shifted and where I sat. My elbow hurt, my knees hurt, my shoulder was tender. I was in a daze. It felt like everything was happening at once. The pain in my arm would ebb and flow, sometimes white hot and sometimes just a dull ache. I moved my fingers gingerly, relieved that I could still move them.

A TFL worker came to be, worried and seemed relieved as I was able to gather my wits and get up unsteadily. He wanted to call an ambulance, but I waved him off (gingerly because I was in pain). My partner agreed with the guy and insisted on visiting A&E, but I was fine. “I’m OK,” I said poo-pooing their worry.

I made my way to the train, hopped on, and sat down, trying to suss out what was happening to my limbs. My partner stared at me in what looked like horror. I tried to manage the pain that would sweep over me in waves. At times, the pain was practically unbearable. Then once subsided, the pain would just small enough, that I felt fine. My pain was like what I imagine an earthquake was like – a rolling. The pain rolled. My partner saw my pale face and begged me to go to the hospital and I finally relented more to assuage his fears.

By luck we were near Charing Cross Hospital as we had just pulled up to the Hammersmith train stop. We made our way to the A&E waiting room. Because we were still in the midst of the pandemic, lockdown rules meant my partner had to stand in the cold, blustery winder night, while I was inside. There was a freezing rain that pelted the windows and he huddled under an umbrella, freezing. In one of the many absurdities of not only that evening but of that time, I was by myself, all alone in the waiting room, and yet still, he wasn’t allowed to wait with me.

Throughout the night, I was visited by several nurses and junior doctors. I was interviewed by several staff members, each asking me to repeat my adventure. More than one member of the NHS enquired about my safety and asked me if I had somewhere safe to go. I had x-rays done of my elbow and the junior doctor (a woman probably twenty years younger than I) confirmed that the elbow was shattered and would probably need pins. In fact, she was almost impressed with the fracture – one of the first of its kind (she likened it to a car boot being opened). The doctor then launched into manipulating my shoulder, massaging it, poking it and prodding it. I felt no pain, no discomfort, so she was satisfied that it was fractured. The x-ray technician who took pictures of my elbow wasn’t so sure, remembering the difficulty I had in performing some of the poses she needed when taking pictures of my elbow. She insisted on taking x-rays of my shoulder and both of us struggled with getting me positioned to get good shots. When she looked at the pictures we managed to get done, she called the doctor, who told me with some gravity that my shoulder was essentially destroyed and that I would need a fake shoulder.

After the surgery, I was bedridden for a couple of weeks, my arm in a sling, my body propped up on a wedge pillow. Just as in the depths of the worse of lockdown, I was again, trapped in my home, stressed, unable to focus, as my mind again was wracked with angst and tedium. I also developed insomnia, so I turned to mindless TV again, hoping to successfully shut off my brain.

And that’s how Martha Stewart saved me.

The first few days of my recovery were stressful. Though the surgery was very successful, I was left in pain that felt worse than the break (I honestly questioned the wisdom of having the surgery). Though my emotional trauma from the accident was relatively minimal, I was still a mess because everything was difficult: easting, sleeping, using the bathroom, washing, sitting. Because of my sling and cast, I had to wash myself with a bucket and sponge like a car. I couldn’t wear shirts with sleeves, so I took to wearing ponchos, caftans, and muumuus, looking like 70s-era Allan Carr.

But in Martha’s world, none of that mattered. Pain didn’t exist in Martha’s world. In Martha’s World, everything is perfect and everything has its place. Monologist Julia Sweeney describes in her piece, In the Family Way, the relief she felt watching the Food Network, when going through a painful divorce. “To think,” Sweeney said, “that anytime, day or night, you can just turn on the TV in your home and have someone cooking for you.” She then added this very real truth: “I honestly think the Food Channel has saved lives.”

Sweeney isn’t indulging in hyperbole when suggesting that cooking TV saves lives because I knew exactly what she was saying. Watching Martha Stewart meant living vicariously through her. It wasn’t just she who was planning fantastic dinner parties or joyous Christmas celebrations – I was there, too, right alongside her. No longer was I stuck in bed, stewing in my pain and figuring out how my life has changed with my injury, but instead, I was with Martha, putting together the perfect roasted chicken.

For someone who grew up with a single working mom, domestic duties like cooking felt like a novelty or hobby. My mother was too busy to cook and, honestly, she didn’t really care for it. I picked up cooking, excelled at it, partly because of necessity, but mostly out of enjoyment. Cooking is a salve for a rough or challenging day. Despite happened at work or on your commute,  at home, in front of your mise-en-place, you are in control. It’s through your efforts, that you create magic and a meal is prepared. You’ve taken seemingly disparate objects that have nothing to do with each other, you add heat, spices, and voila! Even if it’s just a great plate of scrambled eggs (I like mine soft and gloopy, like the French do), you’ve made a masterpiece. 

For her fans, Martha Stewart is the personification of class and elegance. She’s aspirational. For others – her detractors – she’s the dark side of domesticity, gendered expectations of domestic labor, and capitalism. For some women – mothers, grandmothers, wives – Stewart isn’t merely a TV personality, but a figure to which they’re compared. This criticism isn’t unjust: Stewart creates these palatial lands of perfection, but what we see on television is the end result of hours of work – not just Stewart’s but an army comprised of set designers, food stylists, camera people, Pas, lighters, makeup artists, hair people, editors, directors, writers. Stewart is at once, a figure, a figurehead, and a collaboration. Nothing that comes from her is her own, but instead a tasteful collage of work from a lot of different people. And so, the antipathy is understandable. I get it. If my husband or kid petulantly compared me to Stewart because my cookies were to dense or my cake was too dry, I’d be resentful, too.

That is one of the (few) benefits of being in a queer relationship. These gendered ideas don’t apply to queer male relationships. And as a cis man, I wasn’t conditioned for years by society, history, and culture that it is my duty to take care of the home, raise kids, be beautiful, hold down a job, and be likable – all at the same time.

So, I can enjoy Martha Stewart in a very selfish and uncomplicated way. My consumption of her work is free of patriarchal expectations of femininity and domesticity, and I can simply revel in how fabulous and together everything looks.

One of the things about recovery is that people can expect a strange new sense of existentialism. This feeling comes from being put under for a few hours, essentially east into a semi-coma, while trained surgeons and nurses are cutting away at your body to fix you up. When I was told that I needed surgery, I wasn’t worried about making it through – this was, after all, a relatively routine operations and it would only last a few hours. My worry came from an odd, philosophical source: I was worried about being under anesthesia for a few hours. I didn’t know what that sensation would be like and more importantly, I was wary about how I’d feel after. What if I woke up in the middle of the surgery? What if I woke up different? Would I dream? Would I be aware of being operated on? (My poor anesthesiologist tried to reassure me before the operation but was somewhat befuddled by my weird set of questions.)

It’s in these disquieting questions of identity and self that I sought to hurry away by watching more Martha. I didn’t have to worry about pesky questions of self, existence, life and the meaning of all this, because I was too busy watching Martha make potato latkes for Chanukkah. Questions of mortality and that thin, membrane-like border between life and death get very real and scary when faced with these thoughts – but Martha neutralizes that by showing viewers how to make a pirate’s hat out of construction paper for Halloween.

In his research for his PhD at the University of Glasgow, Kerr Castle examined the comforting effect television has on various groups of people, including NHS patients (of which I include myself). In his work, Castle addressed the importance of place, specifically when subjects were reporting on their TV-watching habits. He contrasts different patients’ experiences watching television from hospital rooms, suggesting that television brings on certain tropes of normalcy in extraordinary situations. Castle writes, “[T]elevision in the hospital setting might allow a person to recover some sense of self, a way to feel ‘normal’ in what is otherwise a very abnormal situation.” He emphasizes the “viewer’s ability to identify and utilize comforting television texts that respond to their situation and provide them with the right emotional boost to carry on with their day-to-day life and maintain their ontological security.”

The ’ontological security’ is a key phrase in Castle’s research because that is precisely what I sought. Though I knew I’d be fine and in a larger sense, I knew that my recovery was relatively minor compared to other patients, the injury, surgery, and recovery were so disruptive that watching placid television like Martha Stewart was, if not a lifesaver, a way for feeling safe. Her sense of precision, control, and order provided a stability that I was lacking due to facing the fragility of my body and the instability of life. Yes, Stewart’s stability wasn’t real, and it wasn’t mine, but I was consuming television and experiencing it vicariously.

And one of the ways that Stewart imparts that stability is through her voice. How could anyone listen to Stewart’s dulcet, mild tone and not be hypnotized. Her affected New England dialect, wiping away any note of her Polish American New Jersey roots, was like the kind of trans-Atlantic accents of the Golden Age of Hollywood actresses. Jason Ensler’s 2003 TV movie Martha, Inc: The Story of Martha Stewart, depicted our domestic deity as a tight, screaming megalomaniac. As portrayed by Cybill Shepherd, the Martha Stewart in the film is a chilly, terrifying cliché of her public image. (Stewart hilariously dragged the film and condemned Shepherd’s performance as “very bad.”) Stewart herself had some fun with this scary image with a guest appearance as the villain-of-the-week on Dick Wolf’s Law & Order.

But I don’t find Martha Stewart. (Probably because I don’t work for her.) That voice mesmerizes, like a white noise machine at a therapist’s office. At times during my recovery, I wasn’t actually watching Martha Stewart but simply listening to her, playing her videos in the background as if she was music. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t always see what she was going on about. Her voice was enough. It would lull me to a restful sleep during the afternoon. Not because she was boring, far from it: it was because she was so soothing.

Eventually, I did recover, and normal sleep returned. My arm and shoulder will never be the same and I’ve got scars as a souvenir. But I’m cool. I’ve adjusted. The NHS provided great physical therapy which helped me regain a lot of use of my arm. Still, my love of Martha continues, unabated. In fact, it has grown, and I’ve become a fan, becoming an expert on her vast empire of crafts and cooking. My home library has grown with her books and my DVD library includes her shows. Martha Stewart is a larger figure for me during Christmas than Jesus Christ, the birthday boy, himself. Comedy writer Jen Lancaster, a fellow Martha disciple, wrote a book in 2013, The Tao of Martha: My Year of Living or Why I’m Never Getting All That Glitter off the Dog (a favorite of mine). Like me, Lancaster writes about looking to Martha’s composed world in times of difficulty and angst to emulate some of that order in her own life.

Yes, it does sound absurd to place so much emotional resonance in a one-sided relationship with a rich celebrity. It’s a patently parasocial relationship. But I’m still drawn to Stewart because she was a constant in what was wone of the worst times of my life. She was there, cooking for me, building me a tree swing, or decoupaging a cabinet for my living room. She makes things feel easier and happier. Watching Martha Stewart gave me a sense of calm, no matter how weird life can get. And There’s always tranquility when baking a cake.

– Peter Piatkowski

Author’s Note: Writing this essay reminded me of what people did during lockdown to find peace and calm. I think an alternate title for this essay could be “Martha Stewart ASMR.”