BULLIED & BROKE
Nigella Lawson on starting over
It’s hard to imagine, but Nigella Lawson hasn’t always had an easy relationship with food. “My whole childhood was spent with people trying to force me to eat when I didn’t want to,” she says. “I never ate. I just read and talked to myself – anything else I found inhibiting. My mother thought I was autistic.”
She pauses and shakes her head. “I come from a foodobsessed background.”
The cook and author has, of course, made a global career from her enjoyment of cooking and eating, shared in a series of books and TV shows, as well as the occasional live talk.
The latest of these, An Evening with Nigella Lawson, will take place in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch in January – and Nigella (58) already has an idea of the questions she’ll be asked.
Naturally, many will centre on food. Her uneasy relationship with eating – perhaps a reaction to her mother’s determination to stay ultra-slim – is firmly behind her and she has no truck with dietary fads.
“You should not have any guilt about pleasure. You should only ever feel guilt if you don’t take pleasure,” she says firmly.
“I’m a great believer in fat. My view is, it’s a moisturiser from the inside. I don’t like this habit of demonising some foodstuffs and venerating others, but I do think on the whole your skin and your body and your mind are happier with real food and not processed bits of cardboard.
“But in certain moments
I do like a bit of plastic bread with a cheese triangle on.
That can be delicious. I like old-fashioned sweets like rhubarb and custard chews.
The other day I did have a great need for some Milky Way.”
Though alcohol is often an ingredient in her recipes, it’s something she’s wary of.
“I’m quite an anxious person and drink can really exacerbate that anxiety. It gets rid of it at first, but then afterwards there’s that horrible tight feeling of worry and generally just not feeling quite right.”
And although she has lost around 12kg in recent years, she has never attempted to diet away her famous curves, which are honed by regular yoga.
“I have never been on a diet to try to lose weight. I feel like I haven’t lost weight but
I’m possibly in better shape,” she says, with a shrug.
Her chequered emotional past, though, remains a hovering presence. She lost to cancer her mother, her sister and her first husband – John Diamond, the father of her children Cosima (24) and Bruno (21). John’s death was publicised in her early TV shows and has had an enduring impact on her fans.
“If I’m at a book signing, every now and then I kind of have to be cordoned off because people will come to me, and talk to me about death and suffering and loss.
I do want to talk to people
– I’m not someone who’s embarrassed about talking about these things. People need to be listened to.”
And who could forget the end of her marriage to art collector Charles Saatchi, after he was pictured with his hands at her throat at a restaurant?
It meant that, despite having amassed an estimated $40 million fortune, Nigella had to go into debt.
“I had to start my life again at 53, get a mortgage at an age when you’re meant to be paying it all off,” she explains, having swapped their $50 million London mansion for a $10 million townhouse. “I do have to work. But I only do a TV programme every other year. It’s not like I’m there all the time.
“All hard-working people are essentially lazy because we
THE DOMESTIC GODDESS HAS A COMPLICATED HISTORY WITH EATING AND DRINKING