At home in Melbourne’s Carlton North, Melissa Leong is feeling apprehensive. She’s preparing to spend the day talking about her new memoir, Guts, which reveals personal struggles she has never before spoken about publicly.
“This part – laying yourself bare, so to speak, multiple times a day – is challenging,” she says. “It’s mentally challenging. It’s emotionally challenging.”
The former MasterChef judge and Dessert Masters host describes herself as an introvert, a private person who likes to retreat and recover after a day on set. In her memoir, Leong has found a way to balance that need for privacy with being vulnerable. She shares her battles with depression and anxiety, bouts of loneliness while filming MasterChef, and her experiences of bulimia, self-harm and sexual violence.
A running thread is Leong’s propensity for “blowing up” her life. She writes about leaving a secure job to live on a sheep dairy in Tasmania, and her divorce. “I have become a bit of an expert at it,” she writes, though she’s wary of encouraging others to do the same.
“If you are going to push the big red button, you do need to be prepared for some fallout, because it’s inherently a selfish thing,” Leong says. “And when I say selfish, I don’t mean selfish in a bad way.
“There are certain things we have come to realise, as women, that we can do and have for ourselves and our friends that don’t involve subscribing to societal norms.”
‘I’ve met a lot of people that have tried to set me back, and that’s OK because resistance gives you something tangible to push against.’ Photograph: Charlie Kinross/The Guardian
Leong says she shut herself away to write about what felt true to her, including her childhood in the predominantly white suburb of Cronulla, Sydney, in the 80s; how chronic pain halted a promising musical career (she started playing the piano aged three); her work as a makeup artist; quitting her first corporate job and breaking into the – surprisingly hostile at the time – world of food writing.
“There’s a little sweetness in running your own race, emerging triumphant, and realising that everybody who didn’t believe you could do it is just way back there,” Leong says. “I’ve met a lot of people that have tried to set me back and that’s OK because resistance gives you something tangible to push against.”
The 43-year-old called her book Guts because she wanted the title to express visceral discomfort. “Life is not easy. Life is ugly and hard and unpredictable, and often less than ideal, and I liked that in one syllable you have this word that is loaded.”
She’s buoyed up by others in the industry who have written memoirs, including Kumi Taguchi, whom she met during her time at SBS as a judge on The Chef’s Line, which she calls “MasterChef with training wheels”. She feels she’s in good company alongside women telling complex stories. “Having people like Kumi on my side and in my corner have helped galvanise me.”
Leong writes that she has come to accept she was raped approximately 15 years ago. She doesn’t name the perpetrator but she hopes that sharing her story might help others.
“The particular configuration of experiences I’ve had are mine but these are things that have happened to our friends, sisters, mothers, cousins.
“I share these things because I know that they’re not unique to me, and so if I can articulate them in a way that maybe someone else can’t articulate yet to themselves, if that means they feel less alone, then that’s a success to me.”
Hosting UFC Fight Week ‘was as far in the opposite direction as I could imagine’. Photograph: Charlie Kinross/The Guardian
Now Leong is unapologetic about prioritising herself, “because for the majority of my life I have been a people-pleaser”.
“I have wanted to make other people around me happy to the detriment of my health, my wealth and myself, really.”
She jokes about not knowing if it’s age or perimenopause, but “if one of the side-effects is that I give less fucks, then I don’t care”.
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Leong endured criticism from the moment she was announced as the first female MasterChef judge in 2020. In the aftermath of her cohost Jock Zonfrillo’s death in 2023, she was further criticised for choosing to grieve privately. In Guts, Leong describes MasterChef as “a set of golden handcuffs” – at once a tremendous opportunity and also limiting.
“I’m really proud of the time I put in; I learned a lot, I grew a lot, but I also just as equally wanted to continue moving, so that the expectations people had for me weren’t able to atrophy around me.”
After hosting two seasons of Dessert Masters, Leong took an unexpected pivot to hosting UFC Fight Week. “It was as far in the opposite direction as I could imagine,” she says.
She’s a huge fan of mixed martial arts and is about 18 months into jiujitsu training, working towards a third stripe on her white belt. “It’s the right combination of human instinct and critical thinking. Plus, it’s a great workout. If you’re stressed, getting really sweaty and exhausted a couple of times a week is quite good, for me anyway.”
Leong has also finished filming a new show in New Zealand called Taste of Art, with the Amisfield executive chef, Vaughan Mabee. Though the show is “back in the world of food – and studios and dresses and fine dining,” she hopes viewers will see an evolution in her career.
She’s also on screens now as a contestant in The Amazing Race Australia: Celebrity Edition, swapping designer dresses and heels for tie-dye T-shirts and trainers. It’s been “quite freeing” to relinquish control and be at the whim of reality TV’s gameplan, she says. “Being able to just trust was a wonderful exercise for me. I am a big subscriber to: just sign on to every experience life offers you.
“I think we learn a lot about ourselves through being uncomfortable. And not all of those lessons are soft, fluffy, kind, nice things but they’re nevertheless incredibly valuable.”
This philosophy helped with sharing the darker parts of her life in Guts. Any doubts were “overshadowed by the truth”, she says. “If I’m going to tell my story then I’m going to tell my story. I can’t sugar-coat the less-than-ideal things that have happened to me.
“These are things that have very much shaped me in the choices I’ve made in my life. The last few years have been a lot about survival and not much else, if I’m honest. But I sit here now really proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish.”
