Martha Stewart
Martha Stewart, born Martha Kostyra, was the second of six children in a Polish-American family. She grew up in a working class neighborhood in the small town of Nutley, New Jersey. Her father was strict, demanding, temperamental, and disappointed with life; her mother (also named Martha) was a cold, unhappy, resentful housewife. This volatile combination of parental forces, along with the constant threat of poverty, imbued Stewart with a permanent yearning for power and comfort, desires that would manifest themselves as an endless devotion to perfection and a chronic, insatiable ambition for material success.
In an attempt to fulfill these needs, Stewart consciously developed herself in three ways. First, she learned to how to achieve her goals with the single-mindedness of a charging rhinoceros. Second, she became enormously 
skillful in the domestic arts, developing powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men (and women). Finally, she turned herself into the public authority on Gracious Living, Along the way, Stewart reinvented her childhood for public consumption, fantasizing about the happy, loving family life she never had. In later years, Stewart would do the same thing with her adult life, portraying her husband, daughter Alexis, and herself as living an ever-so-happy and perfect domestic existence, an image that was far from the truth. In 1987, for example, her husband of 26 years, Andy Stewart, moved out to live with Martha’s former assistant. (The actual divorce came three years later.)
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