In the hallowed aisles of Target this week, I picked up the first copy of Martha Stewart Living I’ve owned since the Obama administration.
For most of my 20s, I devoured an issue on my Nook every month, sometimes refreshing my library over and over like a lab monkey until it appeared. As with most other things I did for fun, however, I let the subscription lapse when I became a parent.
As soon as I opened this issue, I had to shield my eyes from the bright grievousness of that error. I read the issue from cover to cover, and I remember my life from before. I remember Martha Stewart Living.
Bury me with a copy of Martha Stewart Living.
How could I have forgotten the superfluous, pretentious glory of this magazine? With its pages and pages of copper cookware and open shelving? With its profiles of former app developers living agrarian lifestyles? Its full-page spreads of decoupage pumpkins, its top-ten lists of artisan salts, its sidebars of mason jar lids painted to match one’s kitchen crockery?
How could I have forgotten this magazine, with its mission to make an army of flawless Marthas out of a world of us hopeless oafs?
Now, I also remember that in all my years of reading, the number of projects I have put into action from this magazine is zero. I’m not going to roam flea markets (or as Martha deliciously prefers, tag sales) for telephone tables to inlay with fresh mosaics, and I’m not going to smash reclaimed ceramics to make the tiles, either. I’m not going to mix dried moss with buttermilk to paint a living mandala on my garden wall—partly but not entirely because I don’t have a garden wall—and I’m not going to make place cards out of sycamore bark for my next dinner party.
Again, mostly because I don’t have dinner parties.
And if I did? I wouldn’t be cooking her achingly beautiful recipes, either. Not because I can’t manage the over-the-top plating and presentation—OH, I can manage it—but because, well…lean in a little closer.
Closer.
*whispers* None of her recipes are that great.
When it comes to making food you actually want to eat, Martha, like the rest of us mortals, cowers in the shadow of America’s Test Kitchens. I would argue she’s behind even the crowdsourced excellence of Allrecipes, and certainly the good-vanilla-sourced excellence of Ina Garten (who does not produce a lifestyle magazine that I am aware of, but I would gladly cook it down and inject it directly into my veins should it ever come to exist).
None of that matters, though.
The fact that I don’t actually want to use any of the tips in Martha Stewart Living does not interfere with my unbridled joy when reading Martha Stewart Living.
In fact, I believe it is the key to its charm.
There are a lot of women’s lifestyle magazines, but it’s not that much fun to read Shape or Cosmo or Good Housekeeping because they give you the sense that you could be doing better. Yes, my legs would look more toned if I did squats before breakfast. Yes, I would look more sophisticated if I replaced my Fossil purse with a Kate Spade. Yes, my house would look more kempt if I cut back the monstrous daylilies by the mailbox instead of hoping a herd of deer will move through and eat them in the night.
All women’s magazines are about appearances and about how yours, specifically, isn’t good enough, but the unfun ones are working in categories that are depressingly realistic.
Martha Stewart Living, on the other hand, exists in the realm of pure, aesthetic fantasy.
It’s like that diamond-encrusted bra that Victoria’s Secret used to make every year. Should they have made that bra? Would anyone ever want to wear it? No and no, but did they do it anyway? Do we enjoy knowing it exists?
Yes and yes.
That’s the ethos of Martha, for me. The practicality is always a no. Should I hang a giant stuffed tarpon in my living room? No, but do I enjoy knowing one exists, guarding the fireplace in Martha’s summer cottage in the Hamptons? Yes.
I enjoy knowing that someone in Martha’s magazine kitchen figured out how to a pipe a birthday cake to look just like a succulent, and that somewhere in upstate New Jersey, a boutique hotel serves nothing but heirloom vegetables grown on its own rooftop.
It soothes my nervous system to know that inefficient, impractical, outrageous things are being created in this world for no other reason than that they are pleasing to the human senses.
It is a balm to my soul to know I can sit down with a magazine that is dripping with beauty and yet exerts no pressure on me to achieve anything. I can simply sit and turn, absorb and enjoy. I can reap the aesthetic benefits of someone else’s 5-acre moss garden without feeling the need to raze and replant my own backyard.
Reading Martha Stewart Living gently peels me off the side of real life and reattaches me, with a simple iron-on transfer, to the top of pointless enjoyment.
And no part of the magazine drives home sweet, sweet unreality like the first part of the magazine, the best part of the magazine, the pièce de résistance of the magazine: Martha’s Calendar.
In this regular feature, we are given what is allegedly the personal calendar of Martha Stewart herself, titled according to the current month. This headline in this issue, for example, is “Martha’s September: Gentle Reminders, Tips, and Important Dates.”
We are then treated to the most jarring juxtaposition of mundane and fantastic tasks ever printed, just in case you didn’t already know what this magazine was about. In the third week of September, for example, Martha has jotted down following calendar items, with no context or explanation:
Cut and dry catnip
Harvest apples; make cider
28th anniversary of my Mount Kilimanjaro climb
Yoga
It’s like this every month. One day she’s pruning the lilacs, the next she’s speaking on a panel with Henry Kissinger. You get to soak in the fantasy that Martha the millionaire media overlord and Martha the amateur gardener would share a single paper calendar, and that she is just like us, except when she’s most decidedly not. It’s a celebration of the artifice of human existence, which can really take the pressure off when you have a Friday afternoon deadline.
I love Martha’s Calendar, and I love Martha Stewart Living, with the fiery passion of a thousand wood-fired pizza ovens.
As you may know, there’s a lot going on in the world at this moment—and at every moment. Lately I’m paralyzed either by bad news, or by my fear that I am not reading enough bad news.
In such times of distress, there’s something liberating about reading a magazine that leans in hard to its refusal to acknowledge any of it. Perhaps civilized society IS deteriorating just outside your window, Martha Stewart Living says, but have you considered simply covering it with a set of hand-sewn sailcloth curtains?
I don’t know if Martha Stewart Living can do for you what it does for me, but if you’ve been overwhelmed by reality lately, I’d give it a shot. It’s $4.99, not enough to stuff a tarpon, but a fair price for the chance at a temporary, frangipane-scented vacation from your problems.
Happy living, everyone.
