Ina Garten’s Memoirs: The Biggest Takeaways

Photo illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Getty Images, Retailer

After months of anticipation, the celebrity memoir you’ve been dying to read is finally on the shelves: Ina Garten’s Be ready when luck happens is available now from Penguin Random House. Covering everything from the Barefoot Contessa’s troubled childhood to her romance with Jeffrey and rise to culinary stardom, the book offers an intimate look at the decades-long tenure of one of television’s most beloved chefs. Although Garten has written 13 best-selling cookbooks, she was admittedly hesitant to write her own story. “I just didn’t think anyone would find my life so interesting,” Garten explained People in an interview before publication.

Who am I to disagree with the Queen of the Hamptons? But I bet she’s wrong about that. Below are the key takeaways from Garten’s memoirs.

Garten was originally born in Brooklyn and grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, with a surgeon father and a fearful mother who pressured her to achieve from a young age. “What did you accomplish today?” Garten remembers her parents asking at boring dinners. She says her mother used food as a control measure, serving tasteless meals like canned peas and plain grilled chicken and fish. She also says her parents encouraged her not to be close to her older brother Ken, adding that they were both raised “as if we were just children” and were even separated during homework. Garten remembers spending most of her childhood in the safety of her bedroom. If she didn’t live up to her father’s expectations, Garten says he would hit her or pull her hair. “Then, as if shocked by his own behavior, he left the house or went to the basement until he could calm down,” Garten recalls. She vowed to leave any man who ever tried the same thing.

Garten met her husband, Jeffrey, in 1963, when she was 15 and he was a student at Dartmouth alongside Garten’s brother. Garten describes how Jeffrey told her he believed she needed to be taken care of and offered to be the person to do just that – “educate” 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 them out of the kitchen. And what did I do?” Garten writes: “… I demand that my mother let me into it I’m going to the kitchen to bake brownies and send them to my boyfriend!” The two married in 1968 and moved to a military base in North Carolina, where Jeffrey served as an Army officer. After he finally left his post, they went on a transformative camping trip across Europe, during which Garten cultivated her love of food and quality ingredients, from fresh baguettes to seasonal produce.

In 1978, after a handful of jobs in Washington, including writing nuclear policy at the White House, Garten, then 30, bought a grocery store in the Hamptons called Barefoot Contessa. She worked long hours there and sometimes even slept in the shop. Although a bank employee refused to give her a loan for the business (his reason being that she was a woman and would soon have children), the business quickly took off. Estée Lauder, says Garten, once came here to buy ribs. The success troubled Garten with the traditional gender roles in her marriage and the caring dynamic. “There was a sense in our marriage that he was the parent and I was the child,” she writes. “When I bought Barefoot Contessa, I destroyed our traditional roles – I took a baseball bat and left her in pieces.” The couple split but worked on their relationship and eventually reconciled after six months of separation. “The crisis was real and we could have made a terrible mistake,” Garten writes. “Instead, we listened to each other, changed the things that were causing our unhappiness, and ended up with a much stronger relationship.”

Garten’s first early-morning television appearances were filmed in her two-bedroom home, which was crowded with a 50-person crew. Speaking of overflow, Garten’s sewage system was clearly unable to handle the output of such a large crowd, and it didn’t take long for Garten to notice the sewage “bubbling up” in the middle of her lawn. A truck that was supposed to repair the broken system got stuck in this mud, and as if that wasn’t enough bodily fluids for a cooking show, its director vomited on the lawn. After the debacle, Garten vowed never to do television again, but luckily for us, Barefoot Contessa continued. Shit happens.

Long before she hosted Jennifer Garner Be my guest, Garner, a longtime Ina fan, tried to get to the website Barefoot Contessa in the coveted role of dinner party guest. At the time, Garten’s assistant Garner declined, explaining that the guests were actually friends of Garten. (Her assistant apparently had no idea who Garner was either.) They eventually became real friends and even troubleshooted cornbread together on camera. Time to write my own letter to them Queen of the Hamptons.