Prolific cookbook author and home cook Ina Garten’s Be Ready When the Luck Happens turned out to be a fun read.
So much fun that I ended up wanting all of her cookbooks, too, after borrowing two of her previous books from my local library. (A confession: I’d never paid much attention to Ina’s cookbooks, aside from Barefoot in Paris.*)
Ina’s memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens, celebrates her journey to where she is today. Thanks to a lot of hard word, and with a little bit of luck – apologies to Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe – her life pivoted forward, over and over again.
But it’s what she did with the luck that counted. She was in the right place at the right time. The Hamptons. The beginning of the food revolution in the United States.
Ina, now 76, never thought she’d be very successful, thanks to her emotionally distant, and frankly abusive, parents.
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.
Her father was a surgeon and her dietitian mother, when Ina mentions her at all, comes across as uncaring. Definitely not Mother-of-the-Year material. Ina believes her mother might have suffered from Asperger’s. To make things even worse, Ina’s father was violent toward her and her brother Ken. She recounts his unpredictable anger, how he dragged her by her hair and other indignities, never sexual however. At the dinner table, he always asked his children what they’d accomplished during the day.
If my father told me to do six things, and I only accomplished five, there’d be hell to pay.
Happily, later in life he apologized to her for his behavior and they maintained a cordial relationship until his death.
She often quotes the words, “What goes in early goes deep.” That resonated with me, because of my own childhood, fraught with many of the same things she mentioned.
Yet, despite her successes, Ina still spent many years with a nasty little voice whispering in her head, “You’ll never be good enough.”
What goes in early goes deep.
Her life changed for the better when at age 15 she visited her brother at Dartmouth. Jeffrey Garten, a military brat, spotted her through a library window and was immediately smitten. A true coup de foudre! They married when Ina turned 20.
As a college student at Syracuse University she studied economics. She later worked on a MBA at George Washington University and ended up in a job in the White House with the Office of Management and Budget. Needless to say, writing budgets for nuclear energy just didn’t do it for her. One day she spied an ad in The New York Times for a gourmet food store in Westhampton, New York.
The Barefoot Contessa was born!
The store’s name became her brand over the years.
Reading about her twenty-year journey from harried food store owner to Food Network star and best-selling cookbook author brings home the undeniable fact that hard work, with a little bit of luck, underpins the success of many, many celebrities.
For many women born in the late 1940s and 1950s, Ina’s story will resonate deeply. Her rebellion against the traditional gender roles of marriage in particular might be particularly poignant to some.
Aside from a brief period when Ina questioned her life path and her marriage, her memoir paints a picture of a determined woman with the energy of a steam locomotive and then some.
She happened to be in the right place at the time. The Hamptons …
There, Ina mingled with a number of influential people who later opened doors for her. And why wouldn’t they? Her shop and dinner parties became legendary. People remember how they feel in a friendly, welcoming environment, no matter who they are.
The second half the book reads an awful lot like a Who’s Who of the last 40 years. Not just food world names, but also political and literary giants. Guests invited to her current talk show, Be My Guest, range from headliner foodies to popular comedians and authors such as Stephen Colbert and Anne Patchett.
Be Ready When the Luck Happens is a rich smorgasbord of life experiences. It also includes a few recipes, but readers should not expect a cookbook.
In these days of instant viral fame, it’s refreshing to be reminded that success – however it’s defined – usually requires a lot of hard work. With a little bit of luck, there’s a cherry on top, too.
Ina now has plenty of accomplishments to wow her father with!
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*All of Ina’s cookbooks are available in Kindle on Amazon in a package deal, in case you’re interested …
CYNTHIA D. BERTELSEN 
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