Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Getty Images, Retailer
After months of anticipation, the celebrity memoir you actually want to read has finally hit the shelves: Ina Garten’s Be Ready When Luck Happens is out now from Penguin Random House. Covering everything from the Barefoot Contessa’s difficult childhood to her romance with Jeffrey and rise to culinary stardom, the book offers an intimate look at the decades-long hustle behind one of television’s most beloved chefs. Though Garten has authored 13 best-selling cookbooks, she was admittedly reluctant to write down her own story. “I just didn’t think anybody would find my life that interesting,” Garten explained to People in an interview ahead of the release.
Who am I to disagree with the queen of the Hamptons, but I’d bet several very strong Cosmos and all the good vanilla in the world that she’s wrong about that one. Below, the biggest takeaways from Garten’s memoir.
Garten survived a difficult childhood that included physical abuse.
Originally born in Brooklyn, Garten grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, with a surgeon father and an anxious mother who pressured her to achieve from an early age. “What did you accomplish today?” Garten recalls her parents asking over bland dinners. She says her mother used food as a measure of control and served flavorless meals like canned peas and plain broiled chicken and fish. She also says her parents encouraged her not to be close to her older brother, Ken, adding that they were each raised “as if we were only children” and were separated even while doing their homework. Garten recalls spending most of her childhood in the safety of her bedroom. If she failed to meet her father’s expectations, Garten says he would hit her or pull her around by the hair. “Then, as if shocked by his own behavior, he’d leave the house, or go down to the basement until he could compose himself,” Garten recalls. She promised herself she’d leave a man who ever attempted the same.
She says in her early years with Jeffrey, he “parented” her.
Garten first met her husband, Jeffrey, in 1963, when she was 15 years old and he was a student at Dartmouth alongside Garten’s brother. Garten describes how Jeffrey told her he thought she needed to be taken care of and offered to be the person who did just that — “parenting” Garten, as she puts it. In return, she threw herself into the relationship. “College girls were burning their bras and women were trying to get out of the kitchen. And what was I doing?” Garten writes, “… Demanding that my mother let me into the kitchen to bake brownies to send to my boyfriend!” The two married in 1968 and moved to a military base in North Carolina, where Jeffrey served as an officer in the Army. After he eventually left his post, they took a transformative camping trip around Europe, where Garten cultivated her love of food and high-quality ingredients, from fresh baguettes to seasonal produce.
After Garten bought the Barefoot Contessa shop in the Hamptons, the couple briefly split up.
In 1978, after a handful of jobs in D.C. that included writing nuclear-energy policies at the White House, a then-30-year-old Garten bought a specialty food store in the Hamptons called Barefoot Contessa. There, she worked long hours, sometimes even sleeping in the shop. Despite a bank officer who declined to give her a loan for the business (his reasoning? She was a woman and would soon have babies), the business quickly took off. Estée Lauder, Garten says, once came in to buy ribs. The success made Garten uneasy with the traditional gender roles in her marriage, as well as the caretaking dynamic. “There was the sense in our marriage that he was the parent, and I was the child,” she writes. “When I bought Barefoot Contessa, I shattered our traditional roles — took a baseball bat to them and left them in pieces.” The pair separated but worked on their relationship and eventually reconciled after six months apart. “The crisis was real, and we could have made a terrible mistake,” Garten writes. “Instead, we listened to each other, changed the things that caused our unhappiness, and ended up with a much stronger relationship.”
She almost quit television.
Garten’s first few television appearances in the early aughts were filmed in her two-bedroom house, which overflowed with a 50-person crew. Speaking of overflow, Garten’s sewage system apparently couldn’t handle the output of such a sizable crowd, and it wasn’t long before Garten noticed sewage “bubbling up” in the middle of her lawn. A truck that came to fix the broken system got stuck in that sludge, and as if that wasn’t enough bodily fluids for one cooking show, her director vomited on the lawn. After the debacle, Garten swore never to do television again, but thankfully for us, Barefoot Contessa carried on. Shit happens.
Jennifer Garner got rejected from the Barefoot Contessa show.
Long before she hosted Jennifer Garner on Be My Guest, Garner, a longtime Ina fan, tried to make her way onto the Barefoot Contessa in the coveted role of Dinner Party Guest. At the time, Garten’s assistant turned Garner down and explained that guests were actually friends of Garten’s. (Her assistant apparently also had no idea who Garner was.) They eventually did become actual friends, and have even troubleshot cornbread together on camera. Time to draft my own letter to the Queen of the Hamptons.
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