Meghan Sussex and the end of aspirational perfectionism

Sussexes, surfaces, Stein, and a blob named Bob

Meghan in a $1,325 Loro Piana sweater (and Zara pants, with Jenni Kayne draped over her shoulders) via Yahoo Entertainment

I came to the Meghan-Harry romance with cautious optimism. I was excited when I heard the rumors swirling that they might be dating. I cringed when Meghan posted a photo of two bananas “snuggling” to her Instagram as a not-so-cryptic allusion to the relationship. I was able to put my snobbery aside and let the excitement build when they were finally spotted together in public at the Invictus Games, Meghan in ripped jeans and an oversized white button-down that 2017 me was instantly desperate to procure.

I tuned into the royal wedding at 7:00 a.m. ET on Sunday, May 19th, 2018. I was crestfallen when I saw Meghan’s poorly-tailored Givenchy dress (Clare Waight Keller’s fault, not hers), but my concerns were assuaged by her second look, a stunning halter-neck Stella McCartney gown¹. I was excited about her future as a royal and eager to see the “foursome” of Kate, William, Meghan, and Harry in action together.

I followed Meghan and Harry’s journey when relations soured, too. I watched the Oprah interview with the rest of the world and was upset but not surprised at the revelations within. I saw the abhorrent British press coverage of Meghan and understood why she wanted to move back to America.

Since, then, though? Well….

Let’s skip ahead past Archetypes (Meghan’s podcast about female stereotypes, where staff members allegedly conducted interviews for her before cutting in her audio), Harry’s much-discussed 416-page memoir Spare in which he airs decades of family drama and frequently self-owns without realizing it (I read every word, no comment), and Meghan’s jam company American Riviera Orchard (the brand featured products which were never available to the public, and has since been renamed “As Ever,” with products…still not available to the public) and onto the topic of the week: With Love, Meghan, Meghan’s recently released Netflix series about…well, I’m not exactly sure.

I recently read a wonderful book called Blob: A Love Story. Vi Liu is having a bad year. She’s failed out of her college biology program, despises the day job she’s taken at a local hotel, and has just been dumped by her beloved boyfriend of two years. When she encounters an amorphous “blob” outside of a bar on a rare night out, she takes it home. She’s shocked when it begins growing according to her command; she shows it pictures of the most handsome men she can find and, in no time, she’s built herself an Adonis she calls Bob, who relies on her to teach him how to be human.² Aesthetically, Bob appears perfect. Personality-wise, he’s open and kind. Dig a bit deeper, though, and the cracks begin to appear (take, for an example, a scene where Bob has to play the newlywed game and grins his way through getting every single answer about his fiancée-to-be wrong).

At times, Meghan’s performance in With Love, Meghan feels like that of Bob’s impressionist foray into life as a human. I once read somewhere that famous people experience an arrested development wherein their conception of the world is preserved in aspic at the time they became famous. For Meghan, this was around 2011, when Facebook memes were the only social media humor we had and it was considered funny to say things like: “peanut butter jelly time” and “my bacon brings all the boys to yard,” both phrases she employs in the show (among countless others along these lines).

The 2010s were also a time that still rewarded polished perfection and the patriarchal concept that women could—should—have and do it all, and be grateful for the opportunity, exhaustion and unfair shares of domestic labor aside. Sheryl Sandberg was telling us to Lean In (while presumably employing a household staff but never discussing that) and ban.do was selling pastel planners that said “I Am Very Busy” (the CEO was later ousted for running a toxic workplace) by the truckload.

With Love, Meghan seems caught in this time period. It’s a program about proving and showing instead of telling and sharing.

Thing is: the gatekeeping, perfection-projecting era is (mercifully) over. The algorithm now rewards authenticity; Dua Lipa and Charli XCX’s blurry, chaotic photo dumps are still the coolest thing on Instagram; and the explosion of novels and memoirs about female exhaustion and awakening and rage (All Fours; Scaffolding; Soldier Sailor; Splinters³) suggest we’ve moved beyond the Pinterest perfectionism of the 2010s. Yes, you could argue we’ve shifted into a whole new era of performative messiness, but that’s another essay for another day.

Point is: most people aren’t interested in being or seeing a proper Martha Stewart anymore, not even Martha herself, who, while popular with boomers, didn’t become a mainstream icon for millennials or gen z (if she’s even on their radar) until she went to jail.

Yes, the “trad wife” movement has picked up steam in recent years⁴, but no one in the circles Meghan runs in or aspires to inspire prizes the energy of the perky, 1990s DIYer. Most people don’t want, need, or have the time, space, or money to create “balloon arches” for their children and put together painstaking ladybug crostini that will get destroyed by a toddler’s grubby fingers in two seconds.

And yet, Meghan persists, producing a show brimming with the Stepford energy that her younger self (apparently, as a child, she wrote a letter to Procter & Gamble about how a soap ad that displayed a woman doing the dishes was sexist) fought to disrupt.

I’ve read a few reviews that describe With Love, Meghan as “a show about vessels.” There’s been much discussion about the way she opens a pack of Trader Joe’s peanut butter pretzels and “decants” them into…another plastic bag. To me, it’s a show about surfaces.

Meghan stares at us from behind a polished kitchen worktop she cheerfully proclaims is not her actual home, grin plastered in place. She wears poet-sleeved, cream-colored blouses while chopping tomatoes and berries without ever spilling or staining; and “walks us through recipes” without actually…walking us through the recipes.

She doesn’t provide measurements (apart from shouting out rough numbers for random ingredients in passing), she doesn’t share where she sources her ingredients (besides speeding past a roadside stall and shouting “this is where I get my mushrooms”while the camera stays fixed on her face without even panning to the stall); and she doesn’t offer clear recipes.

She’s dead-set on appearing to do everything “casually,” but wants you to know that, in her world, “doing things casually” means “‘casually’ doing them perfectly.” She either doesn’t realize or doesn’t care that this performance means the show loses all value for an audience who are watching her to learn—if not to learn how to do what she does, at least to learn something more about who she is.

I’ve seen criticism of the criticism (“the world is on fire! let her her be her!”), but I’d be remiss not to mention this show—the type of content twenty-somethings like Nara Smith are creating on TikTok at a more rapid and creative clip—being part of a $100 MILLION Netflix deal as part of the problem.

Should we be convinced that making spaghetti sauce in a Loro Piana (a brand Meghan name-checks in the Mindy Kaling episode, most recently renowned for exploiting and underpaying their indigenous garment workers) cashmere sweater in an $8 million Montecito test kitchen is a “normalcy” to aspire to?

Should we be led to believe that inviting fascinating guests on your show and proceeding to only ask them questions that can be related back to yourself is a way to move through the world, interpersonally?

Take Roy Choi. I knew nothing about Choi until I saw his episode. Turns out, he’s got his own Netflix cooking show, The Chef Show, and he’s launching a cookbook in April called The Choi of Cooking. I wouldn’t have known this had I just watched the episode and moved on, given Meghan spent the majority of the time discussing the ways in which she and Choi were similar as “LA kids” and then side-eyeing his pickled strawberries. I learned about The Choi of Cooking during an awkward moment where Meghan asked Choi what music he listened to when he cooked. When he mentioned “death metal,” she looked at him like he’d just confessed a murder, primly admonishing: “well that’s not very Choi of Cooking of you!” It was only via a later Google that I found out it’s the name of his forthcoming cookbook.

When Meghan’s friend Delfina Blaquier, the Argentinian wife of the world’s most famous polo player, Nacho Figueras, is on the show, the girls have a maté ceremony. Maté ceremonies are an ancient indigenous tradition with a ton of history. Instead of walking us through the meaning and origins of maté—or even, um, where to buy it, how to make it, and what temperature the water should be— the girls sip it on picnic blankets as they talked about when Meghan “lived” (spent three months interning at the US embassy) in Argentina, and raise their glasses “to maté and rosé!”

There are a few mask slip moments in the series that give us brief insight into the fact that Meghan might have a bit more edge. When Meg passively aggressively corrects Mindy Kaling for calling her Meghan Markle (“it’s so FUNNY you keep calling me that,” she says in a tone that implies she does not find it funny at all. “I’m Sussex now!”), we get a glimpse into how difficult it must be to exist in the world as a once-independent woman who was barred by an institution from forging her own identity and has now re-emerged with no clue as to what to do next. Openness and vulnerability about said cluelessness (fair enough, given the only blueprint for their experience comes from Edward and Wallis Simpson, hardly an aspirational path) would’ve felt interesting and fresh. The insistence instead that everything is SO perfect and we made the right decision rings hollow.

As I watched and dissected the show with my friends and my husband, I couldn’t help but think of Gertrude Stein, a fellow native daughter of California, who wrote of her hometown after returning from a long sojourn in Europe: “there’s no there there.”

Meghan, too, presumably returned to her hometown to come back to herself after a difficult few years in Europe; but, like Stein before her, is failing to find—or at least show the viewer—that the there is there.

1. In fact, it’s in seeing her Stella dress that I decided I wanted to wear a halter to my own wedding, which I did, five years later.

2. Read it, it’s weird and great.

3. I haven’t read the last two (both on my list!) so please correct me if this is…not their vibe. (But from what I’ve read, it is).

4. and many people have written about this better than I ever could, so I’ll leave these here: from Pandora Sykes, the New Yorker, and The Times UK.