Be Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir

By Ina Garten

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In her long-awaited memoir, Ina Garten—aka the Barefoot Contessa, author of thirteen bestselling cookbooks, beloved Food Network personality, Instagram sensation, and cultural icon—shares her personal story with readers hungry for a seat at her table.

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Town & Country

Here, for the first time, Ina Garten presents an intimate, entertaining, and inspiring account of her remarkable journey. Ina’s gift is to make everything look easy, yet all her accomplishments have been the result of hard work, audacious choices, and exquisite attention to detail. In her unmistakable voice (no one tells a story like Ina), she brings her past and her process to life in a high-spirited and no-holds-barred memoir that chronicles decades of personal challenges, adventures (and misadventures) and unexpected career twists, all delivered with her signature combination of playfulness and purpose.

From a difficult childhood to meeting the love of her life, Jeffrey, and marrying him while still in college, from a boring bureaucratic job in Washington, D.C., to answering an ad for a specialty food store in the Hamptons, from the owner of one Barefoot Contessa shop to author of bestselling cookbooks and celebrated television host, Ina has blazed her own trail and, in the meantime, taught millions of people how to cook and entertain. Now, she invites them to come closer to experience her story in vivid detail and to share the important life lessons she learned along the way: do what you love because if you love it you’ll be really good at it, swing for the fences, and always Be Ready When the Luck Happens.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Crown
• Release date: Oct 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9780593799802

Book preview

Cover for Be Ready When the Luck Happens

Also by Ina Garten

The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook

Barefoot Contessa Parties!

Barefoot Contessa Family Style

Barefoot in Paris

Barefoot Contessa at Home

Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics

Barefoot Contessa How Easy Is That?

Barefoot Contessa Foolproof

Make It Ahead

Cooking for Jeffrey

Cook Like a Pro

Modern Comfort Food

Go-To Dinners

Book Title, Be Ready When the Luck Happens, Subtitle, A Memoir, Author, Ina Garten, Imprint, Crown

Copyright © 2024 by Ina Garten

Penguin Random House values and supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader. Please note that no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.

Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

Crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

All photographs courtesy of the author unless otherwise noted.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Garten, Ina, author.

Title: Be ready when the luck happens : a memoir / Ina Garten.

Description: First edition.

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2024007070

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2024007071

ISBN 9780593799895

Ebook ISBN 9780593799802

Premium edition ISBN 9780593800225

Signed edition ISBN 9780593800218

Williams Sonoma box set ISBN 9798217033775

crownpublishing.com

Editor: Gillian Blake

Editorial assistant: Amy Li

Production editor: Terry Deal

Production editorial assistant: Taylor Teague

Design manager: Andrea Lau

Book designer: Marysarah Quinn

Print production managers: Heather Williamson and Philip Leung

Copy editor: Aja Pollock

Proofreaders: JoAnna Kremer, Tracy R. Lynch, and Eldes Tran

Publicist: Kate Tyler

Marketer: Allison Renzulli

Ebook production manager: Kyle Madigan

ep_prh_7.0_151539918_c0_r2

Contents

Epigraph

Prologue

Over the Wall

What Goes in Early Goes in Deep

Don’t Even Waste the Stationery

Meet the Parents

Sadie, Sadie, Married Lady

That Girl

The Body Shop Doesn’t Do Car Repairs??

Two for the Road

It’s That Crazy Ina Garten!

Starting from Scratch

1,000 Baguettes and the Business End of a Gun

Tokyo, How Hard Could That Be?

The Pinochle Club

I Can Sell This Book in La Jolla

Lose My Number

Put My Jugs on the What?

Cooking with Elmo

La Vie en Rose

It’s Always Cocktail Hour in a Crisis

Epilogue

Thank You!

About the Author

_151539918_

Do what you love. If you love it, you’ll be really good at it.

—Jeffrey Garten

1965, Jeffrey at Balch Hill

Prologue

No, I’m not doing it, I’m not climbing that hill.

My words, on a chilly fall day in 1965: a memory that’s so vivid to me even today. There’s no recipe for writing a memoir, but the best part of being the author of your own story is that you can look back on your life and find the moments that really made a difference. One of my big moments happened at Balch Hill, in Hanover, New Hampshire, of all places.

I was visiting my boyfriend, Jeffrey Garten, a brilliant and very cute sophomore at Dartmouth. I was a high school senior, and while we had been dating for several months, we were still figuring out our relationship. Something was a little off that day, because I’d arrived on campus dressed in party clothes, ready for a social weekend, but he was in the mood for an outdoor trek at a nature preserve.

He gave me a pair of his blue jeans to wear (which seemed way too intimate to my seventeen-year-old self), and we drove to what seemed like the steepest hill I’d ever seen. Hill, ha! It looked more like a mountain to me! After we’d been hiking for a while, I realized that I’d had enough, and I said so. Something you need to know about me: there wasn’t much room for disagreement in my childhood. My parents had more of a my way or the highway approach to child-rearing, and any attempts at noncompliance were met with pretty serious anger. Even questioning what they expected me to wear, or when to do my homework, was totally unacceptable.

Yet here I was, saying no to Jeffrey when I really wanted him to like me. While I stood there stubbornly, he said, Just keep moving! He even tried to get behind me and push me up the hill, which made me laugh, but I didn’t move one inch.

Then it occurred to me that there was something in between doing it and not doing it. What if I kept moving, but I did it my way? Instead of huffing and puffing straight up the trail, I walked back and forth, back and forth, across the path, barely making it any higher up the hill.

I was afraid to look at him. He’s going to be really mad, I thought. It’s over. That’s what I expected, given my experiences at home. But when I finally got up the nerve to look back, I saw that Jeffrey was doubled over…laughing! He thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. In fact, he thought I was really clever!

In that moment I learned two things. Lesson one: There would be many Balch Hills in my future; there always are. Challenges, disappointments, heartbreaks, problems that hit like a ton of bricks, days when I didn’t want to get out of bed. The solution is rarely obvious, and it’s never a straight line up and over the hill.

Lesson two: For all those Balch Hill moments, I wanted Jeffrey by my side, laughing, understanding, and encouraging me to find my own way. I felt safe, accepted, and appreciated. Better still, he had a great sense of humor. And he just was so adorable.

Three years later, I married him.

I can’t wait to tell you my story.

xxx Ina.

1967, Jeffrey’s fraternity house

1978, The original Barefoot Contessa

Over the Wall

There has to be something more fun than this, I said to myself, probably for the millionth time, as I sat at my desk drafting nuclear energy policy at the White House. I should have been thinking about enriched uranium, but more often than not, I was looking for distractions. I was most likely planning a weekend dinner party and wondering which ingredient would make the flavor of my chocolate cake POP (it’s coffee, by the way).

My ongoing frustration was that nothing ever happened in government, and even if it did, it took a really long time. Working in the Office of Management and Budget was exciting in the beginning because the issue papers I worked on went directly to the president—first Ford, then Carter. But after four years of shuffling what seemed like very important papers and pulling numerous all-nighters, I realized that despite my working on multibillion-dollar federal budgets, nothing ever seemed to get done. And when it did get done, somehow the next year, it got undone.

The only good thing about having a low threshold for boredom is that I’ve always been willing to take crazy risks just to get out of that miserable state. In my bureaucratic job, I was just part of a larger process, but I wanted to be the process—to do my own thing, either in real estate or in the food business, and, for better or for worse, to make my own decisions and mistakes, risking my own money. I also need immediate feedback, and there was nothing immediate about government work. The issues I was working on involved $50 billion budgets and $25 billion construction projects; I knew I’d be so much happier if they involved only $25, but my $25. I distinctly remember thinking, If I were asked to be the head of OMB, would I want it? And if not, what was I even working toward? I also knew that my success there would depend on a man choosing me to be the head of the organization, and in 1978, that would never happen. I needed to find an alternate track where my success would be measured by my own business skill and nobody could stand in my way.

I didn’t whine—no one wants to hear someone complain about working in the White House!—but I was withering a little more each day. Jeffrey, who knew all too well how unhappy I was, encouraged me to find a passion and follow it. Pick something you love to do, he urged. If you love it, you’ll be really good at it. And don’t worry about whether you make money. Just do it!

I was sitting in my office, exhausted, and it was only ten a.m. I had the whole day in front of me, so I decided to catch up on The New York Times instead of working. There it was—in the Sunday, April 2, 1978, Business Opportunities section, where they advertised everything from dry cleaners in the Bronx to a coffee shop with an apartment upstairs, or the hottest new food fad in the seventies: a frozen yogurt store (though it was hard to predict if frozen yogurt had a future).

I had never even seen that section of the paper before. As I studied the tiny print, I spotted an ad for a specialty food store called Barefoot Contessa, for sale in a place I’d never been: Westhampton Beach, New York—all the way at the end of Long Island. The ads were written in a shorthand that was difficult to decipher, and the word opportunity seemed like quite an overstatement. To this day, it’s hard for me to imagine why this ad spoke to me, but I’m so glad it did, because it changed the entire trajectory of my life. This was the ad:

Catring, Gourmet. Foods & Cheese Shoppe. Shoppe. Top #1 loc w/unlimited potential. . All new equip & decor. In the Hamptons. Gross over six figures in summer alone. [phone].

Honestly, it sounded like a prediction you might find in a fortune cookie, especially the gross over six figures part. And cheese shoppe? Who would answer that ad?

That night, I went home and told Jeffrey that I really needed a new profession, and that’s when he reminded me that I should think about doing what I love. "Funny you should mention it! I just saw an ad for a specialty food store for sale in The New York Times."

Let’s go see it! Jeffrey said cheerfully. Looking back, I imagine that he was probably just humoring me. We lived in Washington, DC, and Jeffrey had an important job writing issue papers and speeches for the secretary of state. How in the world could I work in Westhampton Beach? But Jeffrey always had the most positive attitude—If this is what you want to do, we’ll work it out. We got in the car the very next weekend and drove to Westhampton to see the store and meet the owner, Diana Stratta.

On the way, I reminded myself that there was no reason on earth why this was a good idea. Yes, I had taught myself how to cook and I loved being in the kitchen, but I’d never worked a day in the food business. In fact, I’d never hired an employee, I’d never even set foot in the Hamptons, and this certainly wasn’t its most welcoming time of year. Signs of spring were everywhere in Washington, where the air was warm and the cherry blossoms were a week away from their stunning peak moment. But Westhampton in early April was cold and cloudy, a sleepy summer resort town reluctantly waking up from its long winter nap. By the time we parked in front of Barefoot Contessa, the place we’d traveled more than five hours to see, I’d decided that it was a crazy impulse and predicted we’d take a fast look, then turn around and drive home.

The shop, a white clapboard building on a corner in the center of the village’s Main Street, was small—only four hundred square feet. It was so small that the stove didn’t fit in the tiny kitchen in the back and was instead right there in the store. There was one employee who was taking care of absolutely no customers (in fact, there seemed to be no one in the whole village), but she was baking big chocolate chip cookies. Instantly, the scent triggered a rush of good feelings, like endorphins on steroids, and my first thought was, I need to be here! I didn’t want to write papers about enriched uranium; I wanted to bake cookies, not just because I liked them (and I do!), but because I saw a completely different life from the one I was living. The food business, this food business, would give me the freedom and creative outlet I craved. You bake cookies, you sell cookies, and if the cookie doesn’t sell, you make something else that customers will love and that WILL sell. It’s a business problem to solve, and it involved chocolate chip cookies! How great is that?

Standing in this adorable little place named after an Ava Gardner movie (it’s about being elegant and earthy), surrounded by beautiful baked goods, gorgeous prepared salads, and ripe exotic cheeses, I experienced a true ruby slippers moment. I felt as if I had clicked my heels and finally come home. I enjoyed everything about cooking, from planning menus to shopping for ingredients, from following a recipe in the most scientific way to making something up just for fun. Most of all, I loved serving the delicious results to Jeffrey and my appreciative friends. It was my favorite escape from my intellectual but totally uncreative job. What if the thing I love to do for fun could actually be my work? I thought. I kept hearing Jeffrey say, If you love it, you’ll be really good at it.

We spent the night at a local hotel that had the ambience of an insane asylum. The room was white, the bed was white, there was not a single glint of metal or sharp object in sight—the perfect setting for two lunatics who were discussing a move that was certifiably crazy.

I’d like to say that I bought Barefoot Contessa on the spot and boldly stepped into a brand-new life, but it didn’t happen quite that way. Remember, I was only thirty and still a little nervous about committing to a life-changing decision as important as this one. Diana was asking $25,000 for the business, and Jeffrey and I discussed offering her $20,000, figuring it would give me time to think about it while we negotiated the price.

But the universe had other plans for me, and they were big. On Monday morning, back from Westhampton Beach, I was sitting at my desk, working on some nuclear energy budget and sinking into my daily stupor, when the phone rang. It was Diana, who said simply, Thank you very much. I accept your offer.

I remember sitting there stunned, thinking, Oh shit! I just bought a specialty food store!

What Goes in Early Goes in Deep

Thirty years old, not one minute of experience in the food business, walking—no, running—away from a really good job in Washington, and leaving my beautiful home and all my friends behind, and my husband (who would have to commute back and forth on weekends) on his own. It sounded a little crazy, but I was out of my mind with excitement. I didn’t know if it would be the best decision or the worst mistake I ever made.

My parents were horrified when I told them what I’d done. You bought a food store?! I thought I was being entrepreneurial, but in their minds, I was moving down in life, going from being a professional with a promising career in government to a shopkeeper, like my grandfather who had opened a candy store when he arrived in this country from Russia.

Their reaction wasn’t surprising. We never saw eye to eye on anything I did. In fact, they expected very little from me and generally registered strong disapproval of any decision I made that was different from theirs. They were all about checking boxes and keeping up appearances, while I always ran as far from the box as possible in order to make my own way.

Our disagreements began early.

For the first five years of my life, our family, including my older brother, Ken, lived in Brooklyn, initially with my father’s parents in their two-story attached house on Avenue A. It was remarkable that Morris and Bessie Rosenberg even had a house, because they were immigrants who moved to America from Eastern Europe—Russia and Poland, respectively. Despite the fact that they spoke only Yiddish when they arrived, they found jobs (Morris was a dance instructor and Bessie worked in a clothing factory on the Lower East Side), saved their money, and started their own businesses, including the candy store and a scrap metal company, scrap metal being a euphemism for junkyard. Morris bought large metal objects like cars, separated the parts, and sold the scrap metal by the pound.

The junkyard was located right next to the house, which was a huge bonus for everyone who worked there because Bessie welcomed their employees into her kitchen. She was always cooking, and like all good cooks, she was happiest when she was feeding people. Her steaming pots were filled with traditional Jewish dishes that were probably overcooked and underseasoned, but simple and delicious. Grandma Bessie, generous and good-humored, and Grandpa Morris, perpetually reading his Yiddish newspaper, created a warm home filled with relatives, friends, food, and love.

My mother’s side of the family…not so much. I suspect I would have loved my grandfather. Irving Rich was a respected doctor, a champion bridge player, and a painter. He had a studio behind his office, so if he didn’t have a patient, he could go back there and paint a still life. My grandmother, to put it politely, was challenging. She was referred to as Diamond Lil, even though her name was Annette—a reference to the Mae West character who dripped diamonds and attitude. Chilly and demanding, she was the polar opposite of Bessie, whose arms and heart were always open to me, her granddaughter who looked just like her. There was no generosity or warmth, let alone gifts, coming from Annette—only harsh criticism.

Bessie and Morris had enough money to take a trip to Europe and came back with my favorite present: my Paris dress. I loved it—a flouncy little off-the-shoulder number, not the usual practical, inexpensive clothing my mother picked out for me. I loved the way it made me look and feel—pretty and ready for a party. I didn’t know where Paris was, but I was sure it was a special place and I wanted to go there someday. Realistically, however, the only destination in my immediate future was a suburb in Connecticut.

When I was five, my parents moved to Stamford, where my father, a surgeon, was setting up his medical practice. Our house on Vineyard Lane was a ranchburger, like several of the houses on the street, brand-new with a two-car garage, a wide front lawn, and all the modern (for the 1950s) conveniences. The neighborhood was actually very pretty in that Connecticut way, with long winding roads, mature trees, old stone walls, and the classic babbling brook in a nearby ravine. And here we were, the all-American family: Dad, Mom, brother Ken, me. It certainly looked good from the outside, but it was all about appearances.

My parents were definitely products of their very different families. My father was classically tall, dark, and handsome, a Clark Gable type with a giant personality and a wonderful sense of humor. He loved his friends, and he was happiest when he could pull up a chair at the center of a group and tell stories to entertain them. When my mother looked anxious, which was often, he’d say, There’s a black cloud over your head. Let’s just wave it away, moving his hands back and forth to dispel the cloud.

My dad had a tremendous sense of style, wearing cashmere sports coats to the office long before everything was cashmere. When most doctors had their offices painted in antiseptic hospital green, my father hired a decorator to design his in bright colors. Shouldn’t patients feel good waiting for the doctor? His waiting room was always full, partly because he was a very good doctor and partly because he loved chatting with his patients and gave them far more attention than their appointments allowed.

My mother was a pretty woman, brunette, slim, neat, always composed. Weirdly, given how gregarious my father was, my mother was not social. There was something missing that prevented her from really connecting with people. When we were older, my brother, a physician, and I speculated about the reason for her emotional detachment. He thought she might have been an anxious depressive with a spectrum disorder. Whatever her condition, my mother liked to be in control of her image, her thoughts, her feelings, and her children. But children can’t always be controlled, which she found very frustrating.

Her approach to child-rearing was basically making sure that we did what she thought we were supposed to do. I dutifully went to ballet school for years, although there was nothing about me that screamed ballerina. Even when we went to concerts or museums in New York, which we did frequently because art was one of my mother’s interests, there was never any discussion of how music or a painting made us feel—it was all about checking that box. And there was certainly no lunch at Rumpelmayer’s, or even an ice cream cone as a treat afterward.

Occasionally I showed signs of the rebellious streak that would help chart my path later in life. I was a Girl Scout for about ten minutes during a time when there were only four varieties of Girl Scout cookies. I tried to organize some of the other girls to do something that probably wasn’t in the handbook, and when the scout leader pulled me aside and snapped, Shape up or ship out, I smiled and said, I think I’ll ship out!

We had all the accoutrements of a comfortable life, but for me, it was a dour existence. Every activity had to have a purpose: it couldn’t be just for fun. My mother enrolled Ken in two different Book of the Month clubs—history and biography—when he was in third grade. Toys had to be educational or they weren’t worth having, so there were no dolls, stuffed animals, or fun games in our house. There was no sitting around after dinner and playing Monopoly as a family. But my mother was so wrong about that. When kids play, they develop their brains, and it doesn’t matter if it’s chess or Mr. Potato Head. The only frivolous toy I do remember was a gift not from my parents but from my favorite great-uncle—the biggest pink tea set with little cups and plates. I just adored it. I played with it constantly, setting and resetting the table, serving treats to my imaginary guests at pretend parties. Funny. Now that I’m thinking about it, that tea set was really educational, considering what I do today.

In our house, my brother and I had one job—to excel academically, which meant that we spent most of our time alone, in our rooms, doing homework. We were raised as if we were only children, with little interaction between us. Neither of us remembers ever setting foot in the other’s bedroom. We played chess (considered educational) at breakfast—Ken always won. And when we sat around the dinner table, we didn’t have a conversation; we were quizzed on multiplication tables or state capitals. And, inevitably, the daily question I dreaded the most from my father: What did you accomplish today? If I proudly said that I’d won a tennis tournament or made a fisherman knit sweater, as I liked to do, he’d say, "Those are things you wanted to do, but did you accomplish anything?" I was confused. Why couldn’t succeeding involve something you enjoyed doing?

If we disappointed my father in some way, we saw the dark side of his personality when he had temper tantrums and administered harsh punishment. I was only three when I begged our babysitter not to tell my father I had done something he would disapprove of because I was terrified of the consequences. When he got angry, which was often, anything could happen. He’d hit me or pull me around by my hair. Then, as if shocked by his own behavior, he’d leave the house, or go down to the basement until he could control himself. I spent hours in my room, crying, wondering what I had done to provoke him, too young to understand that I wasn’t the problem. I kept my door closed, hoping he wouldn’t come in and scream at me. I was lonely in there, but at least I felt safe.

I remember thinking that Ken had it worse because he was the firstborn—and the only son—and more was expected of him. But he recalls that I had it worse because I was trapped in a cycle of neglect and abuse. My parents didn’t believe in me or my potential, but they held me to impossibly high (and arbitrary) standards, nonetheless. If my father told me to do six things, and I accomplished only five, there was hell to pay.

We all lived in the shadow of his anger. My mother was terrified of his outbursts, which is probably one of the reasons she set so many rules. It was her way of maintaining order and control, and she was rigid about our roles. I wanted to cook but my mother always refused, saying, It’s my job to cook. It’s your job to study, so the kitchen remained off-limits. Dinners were more nutritious than delicious, and no one ever asked what we wanted to

Reviews for Be Ready When the Luck Happens

[tmd2020 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Love how real Ina gets in her memoir. She has no qualms about sharing the deepest parts of her life. I have followed her for 20 years from her stints on Food Network.

[jencharlap · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Enjoyed this very much. Listening on audiobook with the author as narrator added to the experience.

[gypsysmom_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I’ve never watched Ina Garten’s cooking show, nor have I looked at any of her cook books. But I’d have to be hiding under a rock to not have heard of her or her nom de plume, Barefoot Contessa. I thought it might be interesting to listen to her read her memoir.
Ina’s parents were emotionally distant throughout her childhood. She did reconcile with her father before her death and she quotes advice he gave her a number of times in the book. However, she never felt her mother even liked her, let along loved her. This may have led to Ina not having children herself although she does not explicitly say that. Fortunately, she met Jeffrey Garten when she was young and they got married when she was only 20. Jeffrey seems like a prince of a man. He supported Ina in her decision to purchase The Barefoot Contessa, a food store in the Hamptons, even though Ina had no training in cooking, nor in running a business. The summer she took over the business was a trial by fire and Ina was emotionally exhausted at the end. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to continue her marriage and asked Jeffrey for a separation. He agreed and said he would do anything to make her feel the marriage was viable. Counselling for both of them seemed to have mended the breaches. Ina ran the original business for a few years and then branched out into another similar business elsewhere in the Hamptons. Jeffrey continued to work in various financial endeavours, including one stint in Tokyo. This time was busy for Ina as well but, at the expense of the company who hired Jeffrey, she would fly first class to Tokyo at least once a month to stay with Jeffrey for a few days. He also flew back to the USA once a month. Ina’s first cookbook was a best seller and she was asked by Martha Stewart to do a cooking show. So, it was a busy time. A partnership with a food company went sour but the financial settlement from that enabled Ina to buy an apartment in Paris as she and Jeffrey had dreamed of doing. She went from success to success and continues to be The Barefoot Contessa
The title is interesting because it seems to imply that she became a success by luck but, it’s obvious from the memoir, that there was a lot of hard work and determination involved.

[squirrelhead_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I had been hearing good things about Ina Gartens's memoir and was pleased when the library had my copy available.

If I'd had that childhood and such awful parents I don't think I would have succeeded in much of anything. They were demeaning, cruel and honestly should never have had children. That said, she rose above the negativity despite the lack of support from her parents, obviously succeeding with most ventures she tackled.

The more negative reviews point out what a privileged upbringing she had with well-to-do parents in a Connecticut suburb. Money never being an issue doesn't mean you have a happy childhood nor does it mean you glide through life with without strife.

There were many things I never knew about the famous cookbook author and the narrative moves smoothly through childhood to present day. The fateful day she impulsively made an offer on the food shop Barefoot Contessa was interesting.

Ina was in a fairly impressive position working on nuclear energy policy at the White House yet walked away to pursue something which made her happy - cooking. Who would think someone with that gig would abandon it to work long exhausting hours preparing large quantities of baked goods and casseroles in a little shop? That isn't saying she didn't burn the candle at both ends working for the government. High stress there and all nighters for sure.

Ina is a type A personality and had the drive to make all of her endeavours succeed. Cooking, gardening, business ventures.....I got tired just reading about all the work she put in. Overall I found this to be an interesting memoir. The parts about her husband were quite interesting to me as well.
4 stars

[rmarcin-630843 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After reading her memoir, I have a new appreciation for Ina Garten. I always enjoyed her show, but was never a huge fan. But now, I really appreciate all she did to make her business a reality. I liked the way she explained her childhood, her early life with Jeffrey, the enduring love, and the struggles and mistakes. It is a down-to-earth memoir, revealing how a woman with no expertise in running a store, took to heart the advice and care of those around her. Her ability to listen, to observe, and to stand up for herself, made her a star. I now look at her with admiration.

[kayanelson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I sometimes feel that Ina Garten, The Barefoot Contessa is overexposed. I read this memoir in about a day. Similar to the biography that I recently read on Judith Jones, I found that I was impressed with Ina’s never ending energy.

I mostly enjoyed the chapters on her life after her acquisition of The Barefoot Contessa store. The calculated risks she takes are inspiring. After I finished the book, I started leafing thru her cookbooks and watching her new show Be My Guest.

An amazing and inspiring woman.

[witchyrichy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Of any celebrity chef, I probably like Ina Garten the best. Her recipes are approachable. She seems very down to earth and has certainly taken risks to pursue her passions. Her memoir shows her growth from a sheltered, abused young adult to a confident, charming leader in a competitive field. She is honest about her shortcomings and often underplays her strengths. But all along she trusts her instincts and admits when they steer her wrong. She is willing to listen to advice from a few trusted voices.

Jeffrey is the most trusted voice of all and at its heart, this is the story of their lives together. She describes the ups and downs of their marriage, although after a rocky start, it seems to be mostly ups. Like most women, she moved directly from her home to her marriage and that is where the issues arose. Obviously, they managed to work things out but I think she described the overall change that was happening at the time with working women pushing back against traditional roles.

We also get all the details of her life from the home in the Hamptons to the apartment in Paris. She veers a bit into name dropping and some whining about costs and delays on her renovations. And, that's where I find myself in a conundrum: I do like her and the memoir was very readable. But, she seems blissfully unaware of her privilege, able to use connections to find funding and recognition that is beyond others. After all, she bought a thriving business in the Hamptons rather than starting from scratch selling baked goods at the farmer's market.

Granted, she took it way beyond the original 400 square foot store. But even that came with a price. Her story of buying a store that would put her in direct competition with her former partner and friend shows that, under her impostor syndrome facade, she is a fierce entrepreneur. They did not speak for a year, and Ina points out that her friend didn't lose business because of her. But she didn't know that going in.

I also find it ironic that she hated the professional world and really did like to cook and bake, traditional feminine roles. She figured out how to make them into a darn good living although my sense was it was less about money and more about having something to do with herself.

I didn't mean this to sound so negative. It was a lovely book clearly written in her own voice with her catchphrases sprinkled here and there.

[ccayne_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As an adult, she has had a charmed life. She was ready when the luck happened and the first piece of that was Jeffrey. A fairy tale come to life.

[bereanna · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This may have been the most compulsively readable memoir I’ve ever read. Ina move thru childhood to present day giving kudos to her husband along the way! Yay for Ina!

[dele2451 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've been a fan for of Ina Garten's for quite a while, but her memoir still contained a lot of surprises about both her and her husband. Another success story for The Barefoot Contessa.

[katyefk · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a fun book to read on my vacation air flights. Ina is such a remarkable person, so honest and authentic. It was a pleasure to read as an offset to the "news" today. Something positive and life affirming. I have never seen her on TV or have read any of her other cookbooks, but I have now ordered one to experiment from. I think I have been struggling with my cooking and there has been a great, supportive resource like Ina available for years. Very excited to try her "foolproof" recipes.

[iudita_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Lukewarm about this. ?‍♀️ She does a lot of name dropping and complaining about how awful her parents were, both of which I dislike.