Be Ready When the Luck Happens, a Memoir
by Ina Garten
(Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House)
How bad could that be?
Ina Garten was the hero everyone needed when, mid-pandemic quarantine, she stirred up a little fun on instagram with a recipe for a cosmopolitan mixed in a lifesize martini glass.
The post earned her more than three million views, and the thanks of a thirsty and exhausted generation.
She originally rejected social media as someone who was too busy for it before eventually conceding, “if I don’t go in the pond, I’m not gonna know what the pond is.” She now has 4.6 million instagram followers, and she’s found it both “unexpected,” and “important” to her business.
The iconic food celebrity was already at work on her memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens, when the pandemic struck, giving her a little unexpected extra time at her laptop, during which she also produced her 13th cookbook, Go To Dinners.
And her success story — the farthest thing from rags to riches — has been well told, many times.
She met husband Jeffrey while he was at Dartmouth. The two married young and both went on to careers in Washington, where she worked as a budget analyst for nuclear energy policy (under the Ford administration, and then Carter), and he wrote for the Secretary of State.
Bureaucracy taught her that she didn’t want to be part of a slow-moving government’s “larger process.” She wanted to “be the process.”
Jeffrey famously encouraged her to “do something you love,” and perhaps more famously, “don’t worry about the money.” (He went on to become a Dean within Yale’s Business School, and continued to teach after he retired.)
In 1978, she discovered an NYT ad for the specialty food store, Barefoot Contessa, in Westhampton Beach, where she’d never even visited. She’d taught herself how to cook via Julia Child, but admits “I’d never worked a day in the food business.” (The name of the shop was a nod to an Ava Gardner movie.)
She and Jeffrey took a trip to the Hamptons (she reflects now that he was probably humoring her) and the rest is history. She knew on the spot, “I didn’t want to write papers about enriched uranium; I wanted to bake cookies.”
She paid $20,000 for it ($5,000 under asking), and later opened a second shop, before selling the business when she turned 50 in 1996.
She says, “I’ve always been happy to jump off a cliff and figure it out on the way down.”
In the third professional act of her career, she became the author of 13 bestselling cookbooks, and the popular host of Barefoot Contessa and Be My Guest. She’s won five Emmys in addition to James Beard awards. She strenuously resisted a career in television, and multiple offers, before eventually acknowledging what a positive impact it would have on cookbook sales.
The memoir shares a little more dish than she’s previously divulged publicly. Spoiler alert: she had a painful childhood, and she and Jeffrey once “paused,” or separated, briefly. The book is conversational and chatty and exactly what you’d expect from her onscreen work.
Although Garten got her big break appearing on Martha Stewart Living, Martha Stewart wouldn’t be caught dead suggesting “storebought is fine.” Ina Garten will. She’ll say it with a wink and a nudge of privilege that makes it clear she doesn’t expect you to pop into the Disco Kroger; she knows she can trust you to go to the appropriate specialty store to pick up the $20 pint of ice cream, along with the $50 pie or cheesecake.
In last year’s 60 Minutes interview where she candidly confessed to being a nervous cook, she took the cameras along on a visit to one of her favorite bakeries in the Hamptons, owned and operated by two local women, who use local ingredients. When the interviewer suggested, “this is all lovely, but the bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich is $20 dollars, a lobster roll is $38…” Garten interrupted her to deadpan unapologetically, “First of all, it’s organic, it’s local, and things are expensive here.”
—RR
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