No need to be a housewife, and no lingering desperation

STUDIO CITY, Calif. — Teri Hatcher opens the double doors to her 1960s hilltop home wearing jeans, a loose white tank top — and a humorously bulky gauze eye patch over her right eye.

The previous afternoon on the "Desperate Housewives" set, Hatcher's cornea was scratched when a Christmas light exploded in her face during a scene for the hit show's two-hour season finale (airing 9 p.m. May 21 on KOMO).

Sitting on a fluffy white shag carpet in front of the lighted fireplace in her living room, the 41-year-old Golden Globe winner and author of the new memoir/self-help book, "Burnt Toast: And Other Philosophies of Life" (Hyperion, $24.95), has laid out a spread of berries and sushi. But rather than use her chopstick to sample the spicy tuna rolls, she twists it up into her hair like a makeshift geisha. Hatcher would like you to believe she is not all that different from other overworked divorcees, which is the relatable voice she assumes in her first book.

Published this week (she is also writing a TV comedy pilot version), "Burnt Toast" offers insight to women like herself who learned from their mothers to eat the lousy over-toasted bread while leaving the good slices to others.

Much ado about Clooney

In addition to opening up about times she has placed others' needs before her own, Hatcher, who as a child once kept a scrapbook of her failures, tells tales of a disappointing dating life. She manages to do so without being bitter. Even in a year when she has watched her fellow "Housewives" meet men, fall in love and get engaged, Hatcher is able to celebrate their joys.

"I am so thrilled for them," she says. "But I don't feel competitive. My finding a guy or not finding a guy has nothing to do with them finding a guy. ... But yeah, I would like to have a boyfriend. Sometimes you feel the older you get, the more that window closes."

For the record, George Clooney, with whom she has been linked, is only a neighbor who invited her to dinner once — with no kiss. Yet that one December evening spawned a soap opera in the tabloids that continues to this day. "I don't really even know George Clooney," she says. "... We weren't even dating! How much of a bummer would it be to have one of the hottest guys in the world be your ex-boyfriend, and you missed the whole thing?"

Abuse had lasting effects

In her book, she says, "I still feel I'm never going to find someone to love who loves me back in spite of and because of all my dark, complicated, insecure places." Hatcher revealed the root of that darkness in the April issue of Vanity Fair, in which she opened up about an uncle who began molesting her at age 5.

The childhood abuse had lasting effects and played a role in the dissolution of her 1994-2003 marriage to actor Jon Tenney.

Hatcher pauses to search for words when asked how her life remains affected by the abuse. "I guess the area of love and trust. When it's a family member who supposedly loves you and violates you this way, what you thought was love and some sort of physical intimacy was really violation. That intimacy can be something pleasurable as opposed to something that's going to cause you harm, is something I've had to deal with."

Nearly sexless marriage

The book reveals she and her ex-husband had very little sex in their marriage. But it is another line that causes the most curiosity. She says in the book, "One of the reasons I chose the marriage that I did was so I wouldn't have to deal with (the sexual) part of me."

She declines to elaborate, explaining, "For me to comment on it without Jon being here to comment back is unreasonable."

Reached for comment, Tenney would only say, "She's the mother of my child, and I wish her all the best."

After achieving what she calls "hard-won" peace, Hatcher now calls Tenney a "good guy." The two were together two weeks ago to cheer on Emerson when she won her first horseback-riding trophy.

Emerson is so much the focus of Hatcher's life that her book's dedication reads: "To Emerson, whose birth was the sole source of my personal evolution over the last seven years. Thank you for giving my life meaning." And it was Emerson, she says in the book, who prevented her from jumping into the Hudson River in the darkest days before she filed for divorce.

Ready for a relationship

Hatcher says she has not had a boyfriend since her divorce. Whether she is now finally ready for a trusting sexual relationship with a man is a question Hatcher still wonders herself. "I think I am," she says. "But I guess I won't know until I have that person in my life."

There are days when she stares at her naked self in the mirror, wondering, as she states in the book, why anyone would want to be with her. But she now wants to amend that quote a bit. "It goes back and forth. On a bad day, I wonder. On a good day, I think someone eventually will."

Hatcher has admitted to a very few Botox and collagen injections about four years ago, but she says she has not done anything to her face during the time she has appeared on "Housewives." "I don't have anything done. I want to see who I am naturally."

But now, of course, she worries that the tabloids will speculate that her eye accident is really a ruse to cover cosmetic surgery. "I'm waiting for people to go, 'Oh yeah, glass went in her eye — sure,' " she says with a laugh. "I'll be the only person in Hollywood who had one eye job. I want that special half-lift look."