You may think you know the butter-loving, finger-licking, joke-cracking, queen of melt-in-your-mouth Southern cuisine. You may have even heard some version of her Cinderella story (a single mom with two teenage sons started a brown-bag lunch business with $200 and wound up with a thriving restaurant business, a fairy-tale second marriage, and wildly popular television shows), but you have never heard the intimate details of her often bumpy road to fame and fortune.
Courageously honest, downright inspiring, and just a little bit saucy, Paula shares the highs and the lows of her life in her inimitable charming and irreverent style. She talks about her childhood, the difficulty of her first marriage, and how the death of her beloved parents precipitated a debilitating agoraphobia that crippled her for years. But even when the going got tough, Paula never lost the good grace and sense of humor that would eventually help carry her to success and stardom.
Whether she's telling tales of good times or bad, Paula Deen speaks as frankly and intimately in this memoir as few women in the public eye have ever dared. Her story is proof that the good, old-fashioned American dream is alive and kicking, and there is still such a thing as a real-life happy ending.
Before reading the book, I had seen every show Paula ever did. Since reading the book, I have not been quite as infatuated. The book, to me, really tarnished her gilding. I suspect that the personna on the "party" shows is closer to the truth, and that was a disappointment.
