Gobsmacked

By Martha Stewart, of all people.

Still from Martha (2024, dir. R.J. Cutler)

I am demi-lobotomized when it comes to domestic life. I know this is a very Carrie Bradshawian personality defect. Most of my plants die; I like to bake, but I get frustrated easily and end up taking out my rage on dough; the copy of Emily Post’s Etiquette that I bought several years ago, at full price no less, is currently collecting dust between my music biographies, slated somewhere between Sonic Youth and Patti Smith. I talk to children like mini-adults and have zero clue how I’ll ever raise one. “Savannah, you are not a wife,” a friend told me recently. “You are a husband.”

Maybe that’s why you won’t see me making grilled cheese from scratch for my Utahn toddlers anytime soon. I am also fiercely ambitious, competitive to the grave, and quick to snap if I do not get things 100% right on the first try. Not having a perfect, impregnable politesse was unacceptable to me. What kind of WASP would I be if I didn’t know how to do this? I read Etiquette; studied elocution and table setting; ordered custom letterheads; and got really into the idea of giving everyone I knew an orchid. In college, I was expected to go to faculty brunches and parties with famous writers, and I was so totally internal and uncommunicative — Which fork do I grab? Is my posture slackening? Am I letting the purse serve me? — that I became a porcelain duck. I imagine those writers thought they were having dinner with a finishing school co-ed.

I didn’t care about the big trappings, like the 2.5 children of it all, much less a husband. What I cared about was how to roast a mean duck or how to plant a garden that’d make the ghost of Catherine de' Medici weep — how to construct a beautiful life with bountiful returns, whether that be a devilish cocktail party or a blooming zucchini crop. I felt, and do still feel, that these little ceremonies give life immeasurable texture, and even if they’re stuffy, we would be far more boring if we lost them. This is all to say that I have always been spellbound by people who can do domestic life “right”: the Ina Gartens of the world, and, too, the Martha Stewarts. 

When I watched the eponymous Martha Stewart documentary this past week — from R.J. Cutler, who also directed the infamous Vogue documentary The September Issue — I was, yes, gobsmacked. I suppose I thought it’d be another anodyne celebrity tell-all, designed for People headlines and clipped group chat discussions, poxed with bon mots about the terror of fame. And while Martha is that, to some degree, it is also a blithely fascinating portrait of a woman everyone has been wrong about, including her devotees.