Her memoir’s title might imply that Garten’s success has been the product of a lot of luck, but that’s just part of the image she constructs of effortlessness. She’s mostly created her luck through exceptionally hard work and by being a bold, decisive, calculating and strategic risk-taker, not to mention an obsessive perfectionist.
Back in 2000, when my brother was still married to his now ex-wife Claudia, she brought Ina Garten’s Parmesan Smashed Potatoes to a family dinner. The potatoes were revelatory. For one thing, over the previous five years of family dinners, Claudia had never brought anything that tasted good. For another thing, these weren’t just good, they were perfectly delicious. Who knew mashed potatoes could have so much flavor and texture? (Beyond the inspired addition of Parmesan, Garten advises to use red potatoes, which are creamier, and keeps the skin on.)
Claudia had gotten Ina Garten’s cookbook The Barefoot Contessa as a birthday gift. For anyone unfamiliar with Garten’s cookbooks (if there is anyone), she is famous for her recipe development, which is to say that she obsessively experiments and tests her recipes before publishing them, something that surprisingly few chefs were doing, particularly back then. (Martha Stewart‘s recipes were a disaster, in contrast.)
Her first cookbook, The Barefoot Contessa, was published in 1999, and in the 26 years since, Garten has published 22 more cookbooks (I have every single one), closed the gourmet store she first became famous for, become a Food Network TV star, and launched (and shut down) a frozen food line. That’s just in her professional life. In her personal life, she has been famously married to her uxorious husband Jeffrey (a former investment banker and Yale professor), bought and renovated an East Hampton compound, a New York City apartment (or two) and a Paris townhouse and become friends with an awful lot of cool celebrities. (The one I am most jealous of was Nora Ephron.)
She’s had an enviably happy, fun and exciting life. You can learn all about it in her recent memoir Be Ready When the Luck Happens. (She reads the audible version herself, and I toggled between reading and listening.)
Her memoir’s title suggests that Garten has had a lot of luck, but in my view she’s being sly. She’s mostly created her luck. She’s worked exceptionally hard and been a bold, decisive, calculating and strategic risk-taker, not to mention an obsessive perfectionist. She has also remained doggedly committed to her brand, which can be summed up with the words “authenticity” and “approachability.” The casual effortlessness she exudes that is central to both her authenticity and approachability belies her behind-the-scenes, relentlessly driven personality. The success of her “oh, it’s just me, nothing fancy” brand is all the more impressive as she has not only become a major celebrity herself, but also surrounded herself with a large cadre of friends who are major celebrities.
Over dinner with friends, I compared Ina Garten to a model whose look is ‘the natural look.’ The ‘natural look‘ looks effortless but in actuality, it requires a great deal of effort and expertise.
Garten has been lucky, as the memoir’s title suggests. Her biggest stroke of luck was being spotted through the window by her beloved husband Jeffrey in 1963 when she was only fifteen years old, visiting her brother at Dartmouth College. Jeffrey was a junior and after seeing her from afar wrote her a handwritten letter to ask her out on a date. It turns out, we learn, that she grew up in a tough and unloving household and the paternal and supportive Jeffrey saved her from that. In one form or another, he has saved her many times since. Theirs is truly a remarkable, blessed marriage and in many ways the story of their enduring, fulfilling marriage is the real heart of her memoir, just as he is the sustaining love in her life.
There are a lot of lessons to take away from Garten’s life, as conveyed in her memoir. My favorite is a recurring motto she learned from Jeffrey about how to think about things that don’t go as you hoped. “You never know your good breaks from your bad ones,” Jeffrey told her. It was a truth that played out repeatedly for her. For instance, after the lease for her first store in Westhampton didn’t get renewed, she found a better one across the block, and ultimately the best one of all in the former Dean & DeLuca space in Easthampton. Losing the lease for the tiny footprint of her first store forced her into growing when she otherwise wouldn’t have, which obviously worked out.
I was reluctant to pick up the memoir myself, until a close friend recommended it. While I religiously rely on her recipes, I had found her bland on her television series. And honestly, even though her personal story is interesting, her determination impressive and her marriage inspiring, there were many moments in the memoir that felt overly massaged. Like each instance where she’d had some sort of conflict — or even the possible perception of a conflict with somebody in business. For instance, her explanation of how she ended up with the Dean & DeLuca space in East Hampton despite making a friendly overture to DeLuca himself — who was hoping to negotiate with the landlord to keep the space for a lower rent — felt artfully written (and rewritten), and frankly defensive. I wasn’t sure why, since it appears that they ended up friendly.
There were other moments where the severe doubts she expressed about her ability to pull something off felt entirely disingenuous — like her doubts that she could become a successful cookbook author when “all she’d done up until that point“ was be a wildly successful chef and founder of a hugely successful gourmet food store frequented by celebrities. Or, after renovating and decorating their townhouse in Paris, she asks, as if the fear were real, “But would Jeffrey like it?” This, after she has told us that in their relationship she’s been solely responsible for all of the renovating and furnishing of all the many places they had lived together, every one delighting Jeffrey. Is there any real question that he wouldn’t like what she did with their Paris townhouse? No. There were a few such instances in the memoir where the drama felt forced.
Last night I wrote to a smart friend who cooks a lot to ask whether she had read the memoir.
“Here’s the thing about Ina Garten,” my friend wrote in a text. “I saw her interviewed by Danny Meyer at the 92nd Street Y. It was the most boring interview. She had zero interesting things to say outside of cooking and she wasn’t dynamic. When [Meyer] was trying to ask her things she had just nothing to say and she didn’t even come across as a nice person. She came across as a bit of a star fucker who loved milling about with celebrities. And I went because I was a big fan of her and her cookbooks! You know those people who seem to have such fun and interesting lives and you think they‘d be so interesting to be with? It’s a shock when they manage to be dull? That was Ina.”
The more I thought about what my friend wrote, the more I thought it tracked with my own experience reading Be Ready When the Luck Happens. There is so much to admire in her, particularly her grit and devotion to her marriage. And yet, if you were to ask me what I thought I’d be “meh.”
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