Valerie Bertinelli Wants You to ‘Indulge’ Every Day

Recently, life has been a bit of an emotional roller coaster ride for Valerie Bertinelli. In 2023, a year after going through a divorce from her second husband, the actress and author proudly watched her son, Wolfgang (whose father is Bertinelli’s first husband, the late Eddie Van Halen) marry his longtime girlfriend, Andraia Allsop. Then in mid-January, she got the disappointing news that her contract as cohost of the Food Network’s Kids Baking Championship was not being renewed. But now the 63-year-old Bertinelli — whose friends call her “Val” — is focused on an exciting new project: the release of her latest cookbook, Indulge: Delicious and Decadent Dishes to Enjoy and Share.

The book is packed with delicious recipes for breakfast foods, sandwiches, pasta, seafood and desserts — plus a surprising variety of ways to prepare chicken thighs — and Bertinelli infuses each page with a gentle, loving spirit while reminding readers that they deserve nourishment in all forms. Bertinelli says she has reached a point where she is comfortable in her own skin and content in her own company. Lately she has been, in her words, “humming at happy.” For those not fluent in Val-speak, that means life is pretty good. AARP chatted with Bertinelli about the new cookbook, her approach to social media and why she’s loving her new role as a mother-in-law. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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You’ve written a couple of cookbooks already. What did you want to do differently with this one? 

This book, Indulge, is a little bit of an offshoot of the book I just released called Enough Already, where I was really trying to do my best to be intentional in finding my joy and finding where I can hum at happy. I’m a naturally happy person. But in recent years, I really was not humming at happy. I started to ignore it. So Indulge was my way of finding my way back to my joy and indulging in my life. And I thought there might be a message here for other women. I’ve been able to build up a really beautiful community in my Instagram, where every time I have written about anything about my self-healing and what it means to go through what I’ve been going through at my age, I’ve had so many incredibly beautiful [messages] from so many people that are going through the same thing. I thought maybe I can help them through cooking, which is something that I absolutely love. And through the essays that I write in here about forgiveness, and to stop beating yourself up if you can’t forgive. I don’t like to be stressed into forgiving, when some of that sh-- is unforgivable. But what I can do is look inside and forgive myself for staying in situations I never should have stayed in, or for tolerating the intolerable, all the stuff that we need to start forgiving ourselves for. And I’m hoping that maybe I can help a few more people find a way to indulge in the joys of their life.

Why do you think the word “indulge” gets a bad rap sometimes? 

A lot of people think like, “I’m going to cheat,” or “I’m going to indulge this weekend.” Why? Indulge every day of your life. You’re only here for so long, you only have so many nights and so many days to live through. Indulge in your life. I have figured out that when I stopped eating, and blaming food, and then wanting to numb my emotions and not feel my emotions — when I started using food in a way that was not its purpose — that is when all of the dominoes start to fall. And now I’ve been doing my best for the last year and a half to feel my feelings when they come up — because feelings, all they are is information. And if you start asking [yourself] why you’re feeling a certain way, your feelings will talk to you if you get silent enough. It’s not necessarily always easy, and sometimes you really just don’t want to feel those flippin’ feelings. But when you do, you will notice that you won’t go towards food to soothe those emotions where you can actually self-soothe. And you don’t need food for that. You don’t need alcohol for that.