Enough Already

Valerie Bertinelli, an actress known for the sitcom One Day at a Time and the Food Network series Valerie's Home Cooking, writes this memoir at age 61 as a departure from her earlier books about weight loss. Writing in May 2021, she frames the book as a collection of roughly chronological essays about letting go of self-destructive behavior, embracing joy and gratitude, and confronting grief. She states that she no longer believes happiness depends on reaching a certain number on the scale.

The narrative moves to October 2019, when Bertinelli visited her adult son, Wolfie (Wolfgang Van Halen), bringing leftover dip from a cooking segment. Her ex-husband, legendary guitarist Edward Van Halen, arrived unexpectedly. Bertinelli reflects on their relationship: They met backstage at a Van Halen concert when she was nearly 21, married, had Wolfie, and split in 2002, with the divorce finalized in 2007. Ed was diagnosed with tongue cancer in 2000, and the disease had recently become stage IV lung cancer, making every moment together precious. Bertinelli regretted not putting her arm around him, overthinking the gesture because both their second marriages were faltering.

At Thanksgiving 2019, Ed joined the family gathering at Bertinelli's house. After dessert, he pulled her aside, gave her a small gold bar he had bought in Germany during cancer treatments, and explained that he had been thinking of her, not his second wife, Janie. For nearly an hour, they shared feelings about their relationship, forgave each other for past mistakes, and acknowledged that the only thing left between them was love.

In December 2019, approaching her 60th birthday and a planned Today show appearance, Bertinelli reached a turning point. Standing before her bathroom mirror, she refused to begin another year resolved to lose 10 pounds, a cycle she had repeated since age 13. She called her producer and declared that the segment could not be about weight loss; she wanted to learn how to love herself as she was. In tearful interviews with correspondent Natalie Morales and hosts Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager, she admitted she had neglected herself, turned to food to stifle emotions after losing both parents within three years, and felt shame about regaining weight.

Through the show, Bertinelli began working with Angie Johnsey, a mind coach who helps people stop using food as an emotional crutch. Johnsey taught her to organize thoughts into mental "rooms": a Mission Room for practical tasks, a God Room for big-picture hopes, and a Trash Room for self-criticism. Bertinelli reports tentative breakthroughs, describing moments of genuine lightness unrelated to weight loss. She contrasts her stalled emotional growth with Ed's transformation: After years of addiction and destructive behavior, Ed got sober and rediscovered his kind nature, achieving a contentment she envies.

Bertinelli traces her body image struggles to childhood, when a teacher pointed at her stomach and told her to "watch that." As a teenager on One Day at a Time, she compared herself unfavorably to her thin costar Mackenzie Phillips. In 2007, she became a Jenny Craig spokesperson, lost 50 pounds, and posed in a bikini for the cover of People magazine after barely eating for the 10 days before the shoot; she started gaining the weight back immediately. She connects these struggles to a deeper wound: Before her birth, her older brother Mark died at 17 months after accidentally drinking poison. Bertinelli believes she absorbed her parents' unprocessed grief and internalized an impossible expectation that her role was to fill a void of loss.

A transformative 2010 trip to Italy with her second husband, Tom, reshaped Bertinelli's relationship with food. In Rome, Florence, and Venice, she experienced eating as joy and connection rather than restriction and guilt. After the trip, she told her manager she wanted to write a cookbook. A genealogy show revealed that her great-grandmother, Maria Francesca Possio Crosa, worked as a cook in Italy and sold homemade gelato to fund passage to America. This discovery gave Bertinelli the courage to launch Valerie's Home Cooking on the Food Network in 2015. She struggled with imposter syndrome, having spent years as a diet spokesperson, but the legacy of cooking in her family helped her reframe her relationship with food from denial to passion.

Bertinelli turned 60 on April 23, 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown. She celebrated with a virtual Today show appearance and a Zoom birthday dinner with friends. The milestone clarified her priorities. She presents what she calls her "Twenty-One Gram Diet," a seven-day program for nourishing the soul through permission, compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, kindness, joy, and love.

She recounts her parents' declining health and deaths. Her father, a retired General Motors employee, broke his hip at his assisted-living facility in Scottsdale, Arizona, and died on December 7, 2016. Her mother, who had rheumatoid arthritis for decades, died in her sleep on June 18, 2019. In her mother's final years, the two connected through food in ways they never had before. Bertinelli expresses regret over never having a deeply personal conversation with her mother, recognizing that both of them ate their emotions and struggled to communicate openly.

Through 2020, Bertinelli chronicles her growing anxiety about Ed's worsening health, her attempts to see him complicated by COVID restrictions and her tendency to overthink boundaries. She reflects that her lifelong obsession with losing 10 pounds was always a proxy for deeper unaddressed issues: sadness, grief, and fear. In October 2020, Ed's condition deteriorated rapidly. For the final week and a half, Bertinelli and Wolfie sat on either side of Ed at Saint John's Hospital in Santa Monica, holding his hands, sharing stories, and telling him they loved him. On Tuesday, October 6, 2020, Ed died at age 65. His last words to Wolfie and Bertinelli were "I love you." The family stayed in the room for hours, telling stories and laughing through tears. Wolfie decided to finish and release his song "Distance" in his father's honor.

In the months that followed, Bertinelli worked through grief using Johnsey's frameworks, acknowledging sadness without letting it consume her. Wolfie's "Distance" reached number one. After a period of creative paralysis in January 2021, therapy helped her begin to emerge. She describes a vivid nighttime experience in which she sensed Ed visiting her, playing a unique guitar piece and leaving her with a feeling that things would be okay.

By spring 2021, Bertinelli resumed morning walks and shot the 12th season of her cooking show with renewed energy. A breakthrough arrived through TikTok's inverted filter, which supposedly shows how others see a person's face. Watching herself, she gasped, first seeing her mother, then recognizing that she was not ugly, a revelation that freed something inside her. During a podcast appearance, she articulates that joy may be her innate default setting, something others have always seen but that she is only now able to recognize.

Bertinelli reveals that she and Tom have separated, their marriage marked by longstanding fissures that worsened during lockdown. She frames the decision without rancor. At her Malibu beach house, purchased in 1984 and rich with family memories, she shows Wolfie and her brother Patrick her architect's renderings for a complete rebuild. Bertinelli closes the memoir by walking down the 104 steps to the beach, resolving to stop counting and simply enjoy the walk, a metaphor for paying attention to what truly matters: love, kindness, growth, and openness to whatever comes next.