Chrissy Teigen cookbook shows she’s hungry for spotlight again

Has the wildly popular model and wife of music superstar John Legend been cancelled for life?

Chrissy Teigen and John Legend at the Grammys in 2020. Picture; Getty.

Chrissy Teigen, who once proclaimed herself cancelled, is back.

The former supermodel, who is married to the award-winning ­musician John Legend, spent years building up her a global brand as a cookbook author, television personality and wisecracking star on Twitter. But over the past year – in the wake of a social-media bullying and trolling scandal – the Chrissy Teigen brand turned its volume way down.

Now, after months being as low-­profile as a celebrity with millions of social media followers can be, Teigen is edging further back into the spotlight with this week’s release of her new cookbook, Cravings: All Together.

Before the recent turmoil, Teigen had been making inroads into the food world, with two bestselling cookbooks and a line of cookware sold at Target and Macy’s in the US.

Her social media showcased scenes of her oohing over a crusty quiche-filled baguette, touting her cheesy guacamole, and even cooking a Shabbat dinner.

Sales of Teigen’s two previous cookbooks tally nearly 1.2 million units since her first title came out in 2016, according to NPD BookScan. That makes her the sixth-highest-ranking cookbook author over that period, two spots behind Ina Garten of Barefoot Contessa and one spot ahead of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat author Samin Nosrat.

Now, it seems, she is once again in sales mode.

“I think you learn so much in the moments where you do lose so much, you lose it all, your world is kind of turned upside down,” Teigen said on NBC’s Today show.

Referring to the social-media scandal that drove her briefly off Twitter, she added: “For me it was a big moment of like, ‘Wow, I need to find out how I can be better, how I can grow from this, learn from it’.”

Teigen, 35, is attempting to rebound from accusations of cyberbullying a teen, after derisive tweets she posted about the model Courtney Stodden a decade ago resurfaced in the spring.

Stodden, who now identifies as nonbinary, also spoke of receiving direct messages from Teigen telling the young Stodden to commit suicide.

In response to this and other allegations of bullying, Teigen issued apologies, including writing an essay on the publishing platform Medium where she called herself “a troll, full stop”.

Chrissy Teigen’s latest cookbook Cravings: All Together

Later, in an Instagram post, she described herself as a member of “ the cancel club”.

She declined interview requests for this article.

Putting out a cookbook “without the full-on ‘welcome to my life’ and ‘here I am again’ ” approach of a major tell-all memoir or other high-stakes publishing event should help Teigen’s image rehabilitation, says Lisa Nakamura, the founding director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan and an expert on cancel culture. “Nobody thinks you’re overstepping; you are just trying to be a useful person by making a book that people want to benefit from,” she says.

Amid the cyberbullying controversy, Macy’s stopped carrying Teigen’s cookware. Macy’s declined to comment for this article.

A month earlier, Target had stopped selling the product line as well; the company said the decision to pull the cookware was mutual and unrelated to the scandal.

Safely, a cleaning supply company Teigen launched with reality star and entrepreneur Kris Jenner, announced that Teigen would step away from the venture. And Teigen’s part as a guest narrator was recast on the Netflix coming-of-age series Never Have I Ever.

The PR issues came on the heels of trauma. Last fall, Teigen and her husband revealed she had lost her unborn child after pregnancy complications. The mother of two children who was used to offering backstage looks at her wealth, glamour and happy family, posted portraits of grief from hospital.

In the introduction to the new cookbook, her third with food writer Adeena Sussman, she refers to the aftermath. “Without a doubt, I have just lived through a period more transformative than I could have ever imagined,” she writes.

In the past year, Teigen has relaunched her Cravings website with new items such as $US248 ($329) silk robes from her loungewear line. In February, she posted a picture of herself in a commercial kitchen and declared that she was looking at restaurant spaces in Beverly Hills, California.

“This … this makes my flatlined levels of pride have a bit of a heartbeat,” she wrote on Instagram.

Matthew Hiltzik, a communications consultant with a specialty in high-profile crises who does not represent Teigen, says for her to come back from the cyberbullying controversy she must continue to demonstrate humility and personal growth – notes that she hit hard in her Today show appearance

“If you’re someone who lays it out there in the social-media universe and you show you’re willing to own it when you make those mistakes, there’s something to be said for that,” Mr Hiltzik says.

Teigen’s other recent business projects include executive producing The Way Down, a documentary series from HBO Max, and developing a condiment with the food company Sir Kensington’s.

Interest in Teigen has remained strong on social media, spiking over the past year during online dust-ups associated with her name.

Despite all the controversies, Teigen is still in the top 0.5 per cent of all US talent when it comes to popularity online, according to Parrot Analytics, which uses a variety of sources to measure the amount of interest around a celebrity at a given moment.

Her score went up in February this year amid a backlash to a tweet about a $US13,000 bottle of wine and updates about her endometriosis surgery, Parrot press insights analyst Wade Payson-Denney reveals. Other recent spikes occurred when her Twitter feed was one of the first followed by President Joe Biden’s official @POTUS account, and also when she briefly quit Twitter for a while.

“People would be quite interested in something new from her if it’s part of a larger story about redemption,” says Jonah A. Berger, associate professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

“It makes the high points better if there are low points.”

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