The Duchess really loves day drinking and crudites: five key takeaways from With Love, Meghan

The Guardian

04-03-2025

'Please Love Me, Love Meghan' may have been a more accurate title. Her hunger to be liked by a world that has decided to find her annoying is genuinely poignant. She really wants you to know what an amazing time you would have if you came to her house to hang out – not that she's letting us see inside her actual house, but never mind. Her love language is mostly crudites – this strikes me as where she may be going wrong, but maybe it lands better in California? Her friend Mindy Kaling seems nice. ('Next time, you come to my kitchen and I'll show you how to microwave burritos.') Also, her beekeeper Brendan, who appears to have wandered off the set off Dude, Where's My Car?, is adorable, so maybe she should be besties with him?
With Love, Meghan is quite confusing as a show because it is all about the charming joyful family home Meghan has created for her family, but it's not in her home – it was filmed in another mansion nearby – and her family aren't in it. She makes oblique poetic allusions to them: it is very important to make your own jam because then your kids will associate sweet cooking smells with home, apparently. It's a bit surreal. Do you remember when Kanye West and Julia Fox announced they were a couple by doing a date-night-themed fashion shoot in Interview magazine? It's a bit like that. The 'How to harvest honey' section turns out to be: wear a pristine beekeeping outfit, stand well back and watch your beekeeper harvest honey, which is perhaps not all that helpful as life hacks go.
Meghan has the phrase 'I'm just winging it' chalked on a blackboard in the kitchen in elegant calligraphy, which is definitely a totally normal thing that someone super laid-back would have. I can't help feeling she overthinks the concept of 'having people over'. When her friend Daniel comes to stay, she prepares her own epsom salts for the bathroom in the guest cottage, tied in individual silk bags. I think she is aiming for Gwyneth Paltrow but it ends up more Rowan Atkinson in Love Actually. Waiting for another guest, she actually says: 'I need to impress this man, with my tidiness, with my kitchen savvy and my cleanliness,' which made me want to give her a hug. When her pal Delfi drops in, Meghan teaches her to make focaccia, takes her on a hike then sends her home with homemade biscuits for her dog. What happened to putting the kettle on and having a gossip at the kitchen table?
The Duke of Sussex likes bacon. That is all I can tell you about Harry, who has one cameo appearance but is notable mostly by his absence. With Love, Meghan marks a sharp diversion from the 'true love conquers all' narrative of the Sussexes. This is quite literally the Meghan show. The ill-fated English years have been written out of history, like that disastrous holiday you once took with the in-laws that everyone has silently agreed never to speak of again. Instead, much is made of Meghan's wrong-side-of-the-LA-tracks origin story, as a fast-food eating latchkey kid. She and Mindy have a laugh over a glass of bubbly about how her idiot British husband thinks a ladybug is called a ladybird. Come to think of it, she does like day drinking, so maybe England did rub off a tiny bit.
Meghan's style signature is a white shirt and jeans – she wore both to her first ever public appearance with Harry in 2017 – which speak to her Cali-girl vibe. Now and again she breaks things up with pretty floral dresses by Ralph Lauren and Emilia Wickstead. But the style moments in With Love, Meghan are mainly pantry and gardening porn, rather than fashion. She has not one but two wicker trugs (harvesting fruit is 'a daily task', she sighs stoically, as she leads us through her orchard), and some chic brass and wood secateurs. When she showed how to make a one-pot spaghetti, which looks very similar to the Anna Jones one I've been making since it featured in Feast in 2020, I was even more envious of her ivory Le Creuset dish than her $1,000 Loro Piana cashmere sweater.