Burnt Toast
by Teri Hatcher
HarperCollins, $195
From the oestrogen delta of Desperate Housewives, HBO's global smash and suburban successor to the urbane and urban Sex and the City comes an actual book.
Written by - as opposed to ghosted in the name of - Teri Hatcher (Susan Mayer in the show), Burnt Toast and Other Philosophies of Life is both heartfelt and surprisingly entertaining. An amalgam of autobiography, self-help and homily, it's about capitalising on success (the cover shoot came before the manuscript), but also stands as an attempt to comfort those who, like Hatcher, find themselves bewildered by life.
Burnt Toast features chapter headings in curly cursive script and pen-and-ink illustrations in the spirit of Colette Lesage. The cinnamon-eyed Hatcher wrote it on her living room floor ('I like the floor. There's no place to fall'). Vulnerability plays a key role in her life. 'I felt,' she admits, 'like I'd pretty much failed at Life 101.'
She bakes ('I still don't have a Valentine, but that doesn't mean I can't eat cake'). And searching to 'break the clouds', she buys a guitar and plays She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain because 'it felt right'. Her counsel? '[If] you've ever felt like a spicy gumbo of fear and confidence, despair and hope, desire and satisfaction, mother and child, pretty and ugly, strong and weak, then read on. The journey's a whole lot easier if we take it together.'
