Melissa Leong Has The Guts To Start Over As Many Times As It Takes

Melissa Leong is someone who doesn’t ask for permission; she never has. When she blew up her perfectly respectable and enviable life at 30, leaving her job, her husband, her city, she wasn’t chasing a dream or even escaping a nightmare. She just knew one thing: "If I don't change it now, when am I going to change it?"

Her new memoir, Guts, is built on moments like this. Not the post-therapy actions of change, but the terrifying, uneasy ones that you step into before you know if they’ll save you or swallow you whole. For Leong, the decision to stop the train and move the tracks came after a road trip to Tasmania, scallop pies and all. "Where I was headed seemed perfectly fine," she reflects. "But it didn't feel like a destination I wanted to go to."

That instinct, to cut ties and risk it all for something more aligned, whatever it may be, sits at the heart of Guts. It’s a memoir about food, yes, but also about allowing yourself to fully fall apart, before you even attempt to claw your way back.

A first-generation Singaporean Chinese woman in Australia, Leong writes candidly about the psychic weight of being both highly visible and routinely misunderstood. In her early years, she tried to shrink herself to fit. There’s a story in the book about her 12-year-old self, sunglasses on in the backseat, willing herself to be less Asian in order to appear more attractive to the cute boys walking past. "Those almond eyes, through no fault of their own, felt like a flaw to me in that moment," she writes. It’s a gut-punch of a paragraph that says more about the world we live in than any diversity seminar ever could.

Years later, that same girl walks into her first meeting at MasterChef Australia and announces, "I know what I bring to the table. I look like this, but I sound white." She says it wasn’t to provoke the panel, just a fact. The awkwardness in the room, she admits, was "rightly delicious". In our interview, Leong recalls that moment with her signature mix of grace and grit.

She doesn’t say this to throw shade at any show or network. It's a statement about Australia. "We are still in the gap. We’re still a long way away from where we need to be to accept diversity."

Leong knows what it means to carry representation on her back. And she knows the cost. "When the resonance came back that it mattered to people that I was there — from a cultural perspective, from a diversity perspective — it would be remiss of me not to take that seriously," she says. "But I also need to keep some agency for myself."

Guts doesn’t glamorise burnout or play resilience for likes. Leong writes candidly and honestly about her own mental health crash: a full system shutdown that demanded therapy, routine, and a ruthless commitment to herself. In our conversation, she calls self-care "boring, unglamorous repetition".

“It’s not sexy,” she says. "It's not sheet masks and 27-step skincare routines. It’s going to bed early, and it’s keeping your therapy appointments even when you feel good. It’s consistency and a long-term commitment to healing."

Movement helps, too. "Even if I really don’t fucking want to, I will do it anyway. Even just a little bit, because moving helps my brain settle."

Food, of course, remains a thorough life force. In the book, she offers recipes alongside essays, but they’re not filler; they’re her survival tools. Her go-to dish? A simple Szechuan pepper pork mince with celery and jasmine rice.

"It’s meat. It’s starch. It’s something you can assemble in 10 minutes," she says. "But it’s grounding, replenishing and nourishing. That dish reminds me I’ve survived myself."

That dish is a metaphor for the entire book. It’s not fancy, it’s not trying to be anything it’s not, but it is real, and it does work.

When asked what she'd tell someone who finishes Guts and wants to live with that kind of courage, she doesn’t hesitate: "Sit with yourself and be patient. A lot of the answers are already there, and we often don’t need to seek them externally. If we can find space to be alone and sit in the discomfort, the answers will come."

Melissa Leong doesn’t sell a fantasy of strength. She writes from the middle of the mess, with no guarantees. She's never been the type of person to tell you how to be brave, but rather show you what it looks like to do it scared. That’s the power of Guts, and it’s the longstanding power of Australia's cultural treasure, Melissa Leong.