I started reading the magazines right before my wedding. Good Housekeeping, Redbook, Women’s Day, Family Circle. When I became a parent (nine months after marriage), I expanded my reading to include parenting magazines, but it was the magazines that showed me how to keep house, marriage, and family intact that really hooked me in.

I was 25. New to the world of housekeeping, cooking, marriage. I lived at home with my parents until a month before the wedding. I never lived alone. And now here I was, part of a couple living together. There was more than me to think about. I couldn’t just throw my clothes on the chair in my room or eat cereal for dinner. That was for singles. I was married. I was a lady of the house. I had to look and act the part, so I turned to the myriad periodicals available to me to help me sort it all out. Sometimes I bought the magazines at 7–11, but mostly I went to the library and spent hours there poring through the pages of current and back issues. I was a woman obsessed.

It was all there between the slick pages; recipes, cleaning tips, motivational mantras, exercise programs, decorating themes. I ate it up. We had a small apartment — a dormered one bedroom on the second floor of my cousin’s house — and I tried my best to make it our home, using all the ideas in the magazine, ideas I made photocopies of and saved in well organized folders. I would become the perfect partner, the perfect housekeeper and, later, the…