An advertising copy writer, Bracken hated routine chores: cooking and paying taxes “become no less painful through repetition,” she said.
She couldn’t do much about paying taxes, but she came up with a new cookbook for working women like herself: The I Hate to Cook Book * was released in 1960, and hit such a chord that it sold 3 million copies — triple the number of copies of the 1961 book by another up-and-coming chef, Julia Child.
TIHtCB included such dry suggestions as letting a dish “cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink.” Her “Aggression Cookies” helped with “channeling some energies away from throwing bricks.” She wrote several other books in the “I Hate” series, and finished with a memoir in 1996, On Getting Old for the First Time. She died October 20 from pulmonary fibrosis at 89.