How to Cook Your Daughter: A Memoir

by Jessica Hendra Narrated by Eileen Stevens

Overview

From the daughter of the bestselling author of Father Joe: the poignant and ultimately hopeful memoir of a young girl's struggle to live a normal childhood in the chaotic seventies, and to overcome sexual abuse by her famous father

Earlier this year, Tony Hendra's memoir, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul, spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. The book detailed his life as a comedian who launched the careers of John Belushi and Chevy Chase and helped create such cult classics as This Is Spinal Tap, while he struggled with inner demons including alcohol and drug abuse. But there was a glaring omission in his supposed tell-all confessional: his sexual abuse of his daughter, Jessica Hendra, when she was a young girl.

After more than thirty years of silence, Hendra has decided to reveal the truth. In this poignant memoir, she reveals the full story behind the New York Times article that rocked the world and detailed her father's crimes. But Jessica's story is no footnote to her father's story. How to Cook Your Daughter is also the inspiring story of her own journey, and how she was finally able to find healing within, after years of struggling with anorexia, bulimia, and low self-esteem. Set against the backdrop of the chaotic seventies, Hendra's memoir follows Jessica and her sister Kathy as they strove to make a normal life for themselves amidst the madness, sex, and drug abuse that her parents and their friends-many of the household names in the world of show business-participated in. How to Cook Your Daughter reveals the hope and heartache of a young girl who was faced with a loss of innocence at an early age, who faced a slow and painful recovery, and who finally found contentment and peace within.

Editorial Reviews

Carolyn See

The great bulk of How to Cook Your Daughter is a memoir of what it was like growing up during the height of the sexual revolution under the aegis of a sanctimonious bully…The man portrayed here seems less like a world-class monster than a second-rate creep…The implication, in this memoir, is that Jessica would have gone along with the family secret forever, until her father wrote his pious memoir, representing himself as a semi-saint…Jessica came to see, or so she says in this steady, controlled narrative, that her neuroses, her eating disorders, her overwhelming sadness, had sprung from her father's misconduct—not the pathetic sex, but the lying about it…After reading How to Cook Your Daughter, you can only feel stinging pity for father and daughter both.
—The Washington Post

Jeanne Safer

Jessica Hendra's memoir, How to Cook Your Daughter, written with Blake Morrison, a journalist, provides details of her father's behavior and character that she asserts he omitted from Father Joe. But rather than being a systematic refutation of his confessional, it is an exorcism from which the reader emerges shaken and aghast.
— The New York Times

Kirkus Reviews

Tony Hendra's daughter explains why she went public with the story of his incestuous sexual abuse. Tony was one of the guiding lights of the National Lampoon during its glory days in the 1970s. In his bestselling memoir, Father Joe (2004), he wrote in very vague terms of his "misplaced sexual guilt." Reading rave reviews that commended Tony for his supposed honesty, his daughter Jessica was shocked. At no point in the book, she saw, did he acknowledge the times that he forced her to commit incest. She decided to finally talk about her secret, in a public way that prompted an investigation by the New York Times. Her excellent memoir starts at this shocking moment, then winds back to tell the story of her life with Tony in a clipped, naturalistic voice. A British comedian who had once performed with John Cleese, Tony moved to L.A. to work in television, but never got a big break. Jessica was six years old in 1971 when the family relocated to New Jersey to further her father's career. Not long after that, the first abuse happened, quickly followed by publication in the Lampoon of Tony's disturbing and purportedly funny piece that gives Jessica's memoir its title. (As depicted here, much of Tony's "humorous" writing seems more like an attempt to rub people's faces in his own emotional problems.) In gripping, straightforward prose, Jessica depicts her childhood among frenetically drug-fueled and rage-prone comics like John Belushi and Saturday Night Live writer Michael O'Donoghue. She lays out in an unadorned fashion her drift into self-hatred and anorexia, as well as Tony's increasing megalomania, sexual obsessions and drug consumption. It's hard not to see him as a monster-a label thatJessica assiduously avoids in her uncommonly fair and evenhanded memoir. A polished and touching piece of work.

From the Publisher

Riveting . . . [Hendra’s] head-on confrontation with her demons is the ultimate story of bravery.” — USA Today

“Captivating, witty, and not self-pitying.” — Jane

“Sharply written and absorbing.” — Library Journal

“Excellent . . . gripping . . . Uncommonly fair and evenhanded. . . . A polished and touching piece of work.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Literature of moral power. . . . Father Joe may not have saved [Tony Hendra], but in writing her book, his daughter may have saved herself.” — New York Times

“Lucid and trustworthy . . . exemplifies the reasons for and the costs and rewards of a life intent on healing.” — Christian Century

New York Times

Literature of moral power. . . . Father Joe may not have saved [Tony Hendra], but in writing her book, his daughter may have saved herself.

Christian Century

Lucid and trustworthy . . . exemplifies the reasons for and the costs and rewards of a life intent on healing.

Jane

Captivating, witty, and not self-pitying.

USA Today

Riveting . . . [Hendra’s] head-on confrontation with her demons is the ultimate story of bravery.

USA Today

Riveting . . . [Hendra’s] head-on confrontation with her demons is the ultimate story of bravery.

Jane

Captivating, witty, and not self-pitying.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170036493
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/19/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Videos