Paula Deen
American cook/entertainer (1947 - )
- || At The Bottom
1978 -- Paula Deen was 31 years old and terrified of leaving her Albany, Georgia home; where she had been almost all the time during the last eight years. The problem was getting worse each day. She was raising two boys, and yet she couldn't muster the courage to take them to baseball practice. "Almost every time I had to go outside by myself," she wrote, "that panic would start in and drop me to my knees. Couldn't breathe, couldn't stop trembling." The nausea and weakness convinced her she was in fact slowly dying. Even the thought of leaving her house caused her to sweat and lose feeling in her arms. She had no name for her sickness, but she knew how to combat its symptoms. By staying indoors -- and by never entertaining the thought of leaving -- Paula Deen knew she would be able to breathe easily.
- || At The Top
2007 -- Reflecting back on where she'd been three decades earlier, Paula Deen would have been as amazed as anyone to be receiving two daytime Emmy awards for the Southern-themed cooking show she hosted on the popular Food Network. Her show -- Paula's Home Cooking -- received the award for Outstanding Lifestyle Program, while Deen herself was named Outstanding Lifestyle Host. Viewers of her show could hardly have guessed that she was once too scared to venture out in public. Her energetic, bubbly charm had turned "The Queen of Southern Cooking" into one of the most popular food personalities of the decade, and her fans purchased her books, her cooking/decorating magazine (Cooking with Paula Deen), and her line of baking mixes and seasonings as fast as they could.
- || The Comeback
Paula Deen's illness cost her years of social contact and ruined her first marriage. Remarkably, though, she recovered from her severe, two-decade-long bout with agoraphobia without therapy of any kind. For 20 years, she devoted herself to cooking meals for her kids, because cooking was something she could do without leaving the house. "I could concentrate on what was in my pots and block out what was in my head," she explained. Though she had no formal culinary training, she became skilled at traditional Southern cooking -- fried chicken, pickled green beats and okra, sour cream pound cake and more. For Deen, cooking was her therapy; in those days, she notes, good Georgia housewives didn't seek out the help of a psychiatrist. And so she lived with her condition, year in and year out until finally (in 1989) she decided she'd had enough and took a part-time job as a bank teller in Savannah, Georgia. While working in Savannah, she began making and selling boxed lunches to downtown office workers. After building up a base of customers, she decided to open a small restaurant and watched it grow into a local attraction. In 1996, she opened a second restaurant and appeared on an episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" devoted to the topic of entrepreneurial women. The success of her two restaurants led to a cookbook deal with the QVC network, which sold 70,000 copies of The Lady & Sons Savannah Country Cooking on the first day alone. By 2002, she had secured a television deal with the Food Network, where she proved to be an instant hit.
