Host Jane Clayson speaks with “Top Chef” winner and host Kristen Kish about her memoir “Accidentally on Purpose.” In it, Kish explores growing up in the Midwest, finding excellence in the kitchen, and how Bravo’s “Top Chef” changed her life.
Book excerpt: ‘Accidentally on Purpose’
By Kristen Kish
Editor’s note: The following book excerpt contains profanity.
Julia Roberts has appeared in at least fifty- four movies. She has received four Academy Award nominations plus God only knows how many other awards. She remains a fixture in American cinema to this day. She has reached an untold number of people through her work as an actress and has a list of credits to her name that could fill a book all its own. She is, and always will be, America’s sweetheart. But what she may never truly receive due credit for is the way she changed my life. Because even though Julia is most remembered for being “a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her,” it was her face on the screen in front of me that was a revelation.
“Oh, my God,” I thought, sitting in the dark, watching her deliver that line. “I’m gay.”
I was fifteen when Notting Hill was released, and even though I’ve been gay from the minute I was born— halfway around the globe a decade and a half earlier— this was the moment it really hit me. All the awkwardness and fears, the knowledge that I was definitely different— it all crystallized in the image of Julia Roberts’s smiling face on- screen when I saw that movie.
If that sounds like the memo arrived late, consider the time I was living in. Around the millennium, there were only a handful of out celebrities. About 2 percent of the population admitted to being gay, and women made up less than half that number. Today, we use the word identify as if it comes from a place of power and pride. In those days, it was an admission— a word more indicative of guilt than any sort of assertion of self- actualization. If you came out as gay at the time when I realized it, you were setting yourself up for a lifelong struggle to prove your worth to people, to defend yourself and your “lifestyle” from the judgment of society at large and protect yourself not only emotionally but also physically, since your safety and well- being could very well be compromised (something that is, sadly, still true). You were also committing to a very particular undefined future. And though I didn’t have any idea what that future was, I knew it wasn’t the one I’d envisioned for myself.
I think that’s one of the most destabilizing things about realizing you’re gay. The view suddenly goes fuzzy, like your eyeglasses have been knocked off your face. You no longer know what is ahead of you. There aren’t enough examples of what a happy, joyful queer life could look like to enable you to imagine one for yourself. At least, that’s how I was feeling at the time. Today, queer culture accommodates so many ways of living. That’s part of the beauty of being part of the LGBTQIA+ community. You can create your own rules and find people who are just like you or who might be able to introduce you to a world you didn’t know existed. And if none of the paths on the map looks appealing, you can, and are empowered to, carve out your own.
At that time, I saw only one path— a tunnel, one with no discernible light at the end. It seemed to me that being gay was a one- way ticket to the fringes of society, which was not a place I wanted to be and not a place where I thought my parents would want to see me, either— especially after they’d
worked so hard to bring me into their home almost two decades before, when they received me from that airplane.
To be clear, this had nothing to do with anything my parents explicitly said or told me about gay people. They did what open- minded, well- intentioned moms and dads did at that time, which was to raise me with their same core values, expose me to and educate me about different kinds of lives, and emphasize that we are accepting of good humans from all walks of life.
Once, when I was a kid, we traveled to Cape Cod and Provincetown, Massachusetts, on a big East Coast family adventure. P- town is known for being a gay mecca, and we happened to be there during Pride weekend. I remember holding my mom’s hand, and there were rainbow flags everywhere. It was chaotic but bright, and I recall a clear sense of lightness and joy. I remember my mom saying to me, “Kristen, these boys like these boys,” trying to explain that vast concept to a child. I’m not sure I completely understood the details, but it felt no different from her description of the contrast between cats and dogs. One wasn’t better or worse than the other. They just were, and they were different from my mom and my dad.
I’d spent so much of my high school life trying to fit in, to be like everyone else, so with my post- Julia epiphany, to think that I’d have to try fashioning some form of a life in a world I was sure would never in a million years accept me was not just daunting, it was also devastating.
That said, that realization was loaded with so many emotions, because while it was a realization, there was also a little bit of a thrill. There’s a reason a crush feels so fucking good. There’s all kinds of chemistry going on in your brain— liking someone in that way actually gives you a high, and I hadn’t really had a chance to feel that yet in my life. My friends all went on about this phenomenon in high school, and I could finally relate. It’s not that I’d never had butterflies before, but prior to that moment, I hadn’t made the connection between the flutter and the feeling they’d all been talking about.
When the movie ended and the credits rolled, there was no question in my mind. I just kept thinking on a loop, Holy s***. I’m gay.
Excerpted from “Accidentally on Purpose” by Kristen Kish. Copyright © 2025 by Kristen Kish. Used with permission of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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