Already a successful actress of stage and screen for decades, Doris Roberts went from stardom to notoriety when she landed her Emmy-winning role as Marie Barone on the television comedy Everybody Loves Raymond.

Descended from Russian Jews who immigrated to the United States, she grew up poor and, as she tells it, unloved in the Bronx. Her philandering father deserted her at birth, and her grandparents, with whom she and her mother lived, considered her a burdensome nuisance. By the age of eleven she knew she wanted to be an actress, and this she accomplished through talent, tenacity, and terrific breaks.

With warmth and wisdom, Roberts talks about the Maries of the world and motherhood in general, highlights from her forty-year-plus career, her son Michael, her two marriages, her countless acquaintances from theater, film and television, and her personal struggles with weight and aging.

One particularly touching memoir focuses on her physically handicapped Uncle Willy who, like Doris, had been rejected by the rest of the family and was the one relative besides her mother who supplied love, attention and encouragement when she was a child.

The biography is organized thematically rather than chronologically, and the curtain call of each chapter is a delicious recipe from her own files suitable for the mood or the persons covered, recipes that run the gamut from tuna fish salad to meat sauce to flourless chocolate cake. As Roberts puts it, “I have no patience for skinny people who wag their fingers at us sensualists and explain that the problem is that we associate food with love. Of course we do. Food is love.”