Charli XCX Gave Us New Language for Understanding Martha Versus Ina

Despite Garten’s eventual success with Barefoot Contessa, this initial show did not go well. Garten sent the crew home and vowed to never return to TV. She hated having the huge production crew rendering her home unusable. She hated being told to follow a script. And she seems to have especially hated being compared to Stewart, or being expected to do as Stewart did.

“All day long, I would say to the director, No, that’s the way Martha does it! You already have Martha. You want me to do it the way I do it, which is simpler and more casual,” Garten recalls. She chafed at the way the food stylists prepped ingredients into bowls — Stewart’s style — when she wanted to cut the carrots and measure the flour on her own. She wanted to take a bite out of the food on screen and chew it — certainly not Stewart’s style. “But I’m not Martha, I wanted to say.”

Garten and Stewart: Discussion of one almost always invokes the other. They have become each other’s foils, to the point that we might forget that they were once friends. But Garten’s memoir, published in October; and Stewart’s Netflix documentary, released the same month, have led to renewed questions about the two women’s friendship and why it fell off.

In a New Yorker profile in September, Garten claimed that the two simply lost touch after Stewart began to spend more time at a new house, while Stewart alleged that Garten stopped talking to her after she was sent to prison (a point that Garten denied). Stewart’s publicist later clarified to the publication that “no feud” currently exists between the two. But that’s the thing about a certain kind of quietly competitive female friendship: There doesn’t have to be a feud for there to be bad blood. The bad blood and sense of competition doesn’t even have to come from both sides.

This year, Charli XCX gave us a new framework for interpreting this kind of relationship. Because while Garten and Stewart had their niche spotlight in recent months, perhaps the biggest pop-culture phenomenon of the year was Charli XCX’s Brat, the slime-green album of energetic club songs that belie their raw emotional vulnerability. On Brat, Charli confronts insecurities: the fear of being a flop, the potential loss of her career to motherhood, and, most relevant here, comparison and competition, especially with other women — and especially with other women whose talents and even appearance resemble her own. Sometimes it’s the people most like you who are the hardest to be friends with.

This she explores in the song “Girl, So Confusing,” which was speculated to be about the singer Lorde, another curly haired artist with whom Charli has been confused. Charli sings: “Yeah, I don’t know if you like me / Sometimes I think you might hate me / Sometimes I think I might hate you / Maybe you just wanna be me.” Lorde’s appearance on the later remix confirmed this speculation while also adding a new layer to the relationship described in the song. “I was trapped in the hatred,” Lorde sings, referring to her internal struggles with her body image and social life. “And your life seemed so awesome / I never thought for a second / My voice was in your head.”

Indeed, what “Girl, So Confusing” puts into words is the way that girls and by extension, women — taught to be nice and raised to people-please — can warp what could be rich friendships into bizarre frenemyships heightened by insecurity, projection, and comparison.

To those of us watching from afar, this is the enduring image of Garten and Stewart: at odds, despite their obvious similarities. Stewart and Garten have so many of the same lifestyle trappings — catering career, cookbook empire, Hamptons homes, overlapping general aesthetics — that to prefer one over the other is to make a statement about their fundamental character. Being a fan of Ina, with her “storebought is fine” approach, has often implied that one is misaligned with Stewart’s strict, do-it-all ideology.

As Choire Sicha once put it for this website, “Barefoot Contessa isn’t about wealth in the way that Martha Stewart’s show was about wealth … It’s never about perfection, as it is with Martha, but it is about personal triumph.” Though it is a piece about Garten, Sicha mentions Stewart by name 18 times.

Their careers mirror each other. Like Charli XCX, we might see each of them as having recently had a Brat moment — one in which they both got a little closer to showing us their messy, insecure sides, as opposed to the curated images of tidy, domestic success we’ve previously known. Is it simply coincidence that they each had a big year, or was one’s time in the spotlight meant to beat the other to the punch?

What Charli outlines — and what Garten seems to suggest in her memoir — is that sometimes, it’s hard when people are too much like you, especially when so many girls are raised to internalize a sense of scarcity, to believe that our success is tied to the uniqueness of our interests and personality, and to see other women as competition. Seeing ourselves in someone else can highlight our perceived shortcomings. It’s thinking, Do I want to be friends with this person or do I want to be her? It is, as Charli concludes, “so confusing sometimes to be a girl.”

And while, of course, we’ll likely never know the true gossip in the Garten and Stewart relationship, seeing the women through the lens of “Girl, So Confusing” makes these two culinary icons, whose lives seem so far afield from the average person’s experience, seem more human. We might even see this framework between other cooking stars: the way viewers pit Molly Baz and Alison Roman against each other, for example.

Still, it’s clear that Garten retained a chip on her shoulder about the whole Stewart thing. When Garten eventually agrees to making Barefoot Contessa with the Food Network, it’s because she sees that the producer at Food Network “didn’t want to turn me into Martha, Nigella, or anyone else,” she writes. “She wanted me to be myself.”