It’s unnerving to watch Ina Garten get weepy.
We were at the dining table in her Park Avenue apartment, sharing a chicory salad and a few sandwiches from Sant Ambroeus. (Store-bought was fine, really.)
Her memoir, “Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” which comes out Oct. 1, is already receiving a lot of attention. But not the kind she was hoping for.
The book recounts a life just as fabulous as it seems on her shows “The Barefoot Contessa” and “Be My Guest.” There were homes to remodel, trips to take and adventures to be had. It is also a case study on the sweat, savvy and risk-taking required for a woman raised in the housewife era to build a multimillion-dollar media empire that started with a tiny specialty-food shop in the Hamptons named after a 1954 Ava Gardner movie.
But all anyone — including People magazine and the New York Post — seemed to be talking about was the time she nearly ended things with her husband, Jeffrey, 77, the affable financier turned Yale economics professor, and her violence-filled childhood that emphasized accomplishment over affection.
Ms. Garten, 76, has published 13 meticulously tested cookbooks, which have sold more than 13 million copies. Although she is something of a natural writer, Ms. Garten never intended to write a memoir. “She had to be convinced because she truly thought no one would be interested,” said Deborah Davis, her co-author and a longtime friend. Ms. Davis laid it out in language Ms. Garten understood. Writing her memoir was about control.
“If you don’t tell your own story,” Ms. Davis said, “other people will do it for you.”
Ms. Davis asked tough questions. Some of them were about a subject Ms. Garten had no interest in discussing: her childhood, which she and her older brother largely spent alone in their rooms.
Her mother was a cold woman who managed the family’s apartment buildings. Her approach to nutrition was as strict as she was. Margarine, no butter. Fish and boiled peas for dinner, and sardine sandwiches for lunch.
“She was just emotionally incapable of having a relationship,” Ms. Garten said.
Her father was a stylish, gregarious surgeon who had moved the family from Brooklyn to Connecticut when Ms. Garten was 5. He also had an anger management problem. He hit young Ina Rosenberg frequently, and sometimes even dragged her by the hair.
“When I got older, I thought about hitting back,” Ms. Garten said. “But I was afraid he would lose it.” She finally did when she was a sophomore in college, after he hit her for staying out late. “That was really the most courageous thing I’d ever done. And he never did it again.” Years later, he would apologize and the two made peace.
Even the most amateur psychologist could put it together. Ms. Garten has dedicated her career to creating a paragon of domestic warmth that is precisely what her childhood wasn’t. She conjured a welcoming place where no one turns down an invitation and everyone has fun.
Back at her dining table, Ms. Garten grew emotional. “It just occurred to me while you’re talking about this that I must have gotten over the feeling of shame,” she said, tears in her eyes. “I don’t want people to feel that their childhood needs to be their life story. You can write your own story. You are not who your parents thought you were, or whatever bad thing that happened to you.”
Still, she’d like everyone to move on to other parts of the book. (Like how her success is in large part because she doesn’t take no for an answer.) “People have written fabulous memoirs, and in the middle of it is some sexual abuse by a next-door neighbor, and that’s all anybody talks about,” she said.
The memoir took four years. Ms. Davis played the role of archaeologist, therapist and detective, traveling with Ms. Garten to former homes and pouring through boxes of the lyrical letters Mr. Garten wrote when they first started courting. He kept them up through his military tours and global business travel. “He was like Samuel Pepys,” Ms. Davis said.
Their relationship trouble came in the 1970s, when women began to realize divorce was a reasonable answer to the question “What is wrong with my life?” Ms. Garten took him for a walk on the beach and dropped the bomb. She wanted a separation.
She was 30 and had recently left her job writing nuclear-energy policy papers for the White House to take over the Barefoot Contessa, a 400-square-foot shop in Westhampton Beach, New York. Jeffrey was commuting on the weekends from Washington, D.C., where he worked for Cyrus Vance, President Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state.
Ms. Garten was exhausted and elated by her new career. But she could see that once the store closed for the season and she returned to their home in Washington, she and Jeffrey would fall right back into the roles they had assumed when they married a decade earlier.
“It wasn’t the stupid chores that bothered me,” she writes. “It was the feeling that I wasn’t an equal partner in our marriage.”
Slamming on the brakes was terrifying. She had been madly in love with him since she was a high school girl in Connecticut and he was a freshman at Dartmouth. “Everything changed when I met Jeffrey,” she writes. “This is when my life began.”
Spoiler alert: They worked it out. They will celebrate their 56th wedding anniversary in December.
When “The Barefoot Contessa,” her first Food Network show, debuted in 2002, Jeffrey started making appearances as a taste tester. In 2016, she devoted an entire book to him: “Cooking for Jeffrey.” Over the years, they have become the nation’s premier aspirational boomer couple, complete with a fabulous apartment in Paris (that she fully remodeled, of course).
Their social circle is equally enviable. She has a ridiculous number of famous friends from the worlds of architecture and art to Hollywood. Jennifer Garner is a close friend. She has talked boyfriends and business with Taylor Swift, who owns all of her cookbooks. The actor Emily Blunt says her roast chicken — famously called engagement chicken — helped win her husband John Krasinski’s heart.
Many of those friends have appeared on her latest Food Network show, “Be My Guest.” In the sixth season, which debuts on Sept. 29, the actors Julia-Louis Dreyfus and Wendell Pierce visit the vast, tasteful East Hampton barn that serves as her work space for a day of cooking.
Still, Ms. Garten doesn’t seem to get how famous she is. “A director said to me once, ‘You are the only star I know who doesn’t want to be as star,’” she said.
The roots of that reluctance run deep. She was terrified to send an Instagram message to the author Ann Patchett asking her to be on the show, for instance.
“It was a huge risk to ask Ann Patchett, because for Ann to turn me down would be very hard on me because of my background,” she said. “And yet I do it anyway. I just pull my courage together and I do it and I think, what’s the worst thing that can happen? She can say no, right?”
Of course she said yes.
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