Born into an impoverished branch of the noble Howard family, young Katherine is plucked from her home to live with her grandmother, the Duchess of Norfolk. The innocent girl quickly learns that her grandmother’s puritanism is not shared by Katherine’s free-spirited cousins, with whom she lives. Beautiful and impressionable, Katherine becomes involved in two ill-fated love affairs before her sixteenth birthday. Like her cousin Anne Boleyn, she leaves her grandmother’s home to become a lady-in-waiting at the court of Henry VIII. The royal palaces are exciting to a young girl from the country, and Katherine ?nds that her duties there allow her to be near her handsome cousin, Thomas Culpepper, whom she has loved since childhood.

Now, for the first time, the world’s most famous—and infamous—chef tells the inside story of his life: his difficult childhood, his father’s alcoholism and violence, his brother’s heroin addiction, his short-circuited soccer career, and his fanatical pursuit of gastronomic perfection—everything that helped mold him into the culinary talent and media powerhouse that he is today. He also dishes the dirt on the rich and famous, and takes you behind the scenes of some of the great restaurants.