By contrast, Lerman’s mother Phyllis, an actress, was seemingly repulsed by food, finding her daily sustenance in merely a lean can of tuna. Throughout the book, Lerman’s mother’s disdain for traditional cooking and her eagerness to embrace processed TV dinners as an easy solution for feeding her hungry daughters, highlights an essential gender and generational gap that characterized post-war family life. Resentful of her husband’s demanding schedule and the excesses his work demanded, “I have no interest in being the kind of wife my mother is. It is 1966, not 1950. You (Al) are not the only one in this house who graduated from Northwestern and has career plans,” Lerman recalls her mother saying during one of her parents’ many quarrels.