I’ve always liked Ina Garten. I’ve found affinity in the shared syllable in our first names, our mutual appreciation of chambray shirts, the fact that I too once had recognizable bangs. I appreciate the way she’s always seemed to see food as joyful and that she was always so eager about what she’d just made that she’d eat it on air.
I loved the way Garten paired a cool ease in the kitchen with a warmth of character. I, like most fans, longed for a relationship like hers with Jeffrey. And I didn’t grow up with a grandmother, so I imagined that what I saw in Ina wasn’t dissimilar to what other people — the ones who had “mommoms” to make cookies with at Christmas — gleaned from theirs.
So when Garten’s memoir was released this year, I was eager to read it. Be Ready When the Luck Happens, which hit shelves in October, adds depth to Garten’s public image. It marks the first time she has spoken publicly about more difficult experiences in her life, like the troubled childhood she and her brother experienced with both physically and emotionally abusive parents. She reveals that she and Jeffrey briefly separated in the 1970s, when the two of them had mismatched views on their roles in their relationship.
The book builds out the couple’s ever-fascinating lore: Garten in the doldrums as a nuclear policy analyst at the White House; Jeffrey transitioning from the military to governmental roles to investment banking. Setting everything on its new path, Garten makes an offer on a specialty food store in the Hamptons, despite never having had professional food experience and not even living in New York at the time.
Her new chapter gets off to a rocky start. On her first busy Memorial Day in business, she runs out of baked goods at Barefoot Contessa. The solution: She sends Jeffrey to buy out an entire local bakery so they can resell their pastries and earn the goodwill of customers for the rest of the season.
In some ways, Be Ready When the Luck Happens is an affirming story of getting your life together on your own timeline. Garten doesn’t transition into food until the age of 30, after years of essentially hating every job she has. In other ways, it’s redemptive. After growing up with a father who said that nobody would ever love her, Garten finds that she’s loved and adored, not only by Jeffrey but also by her dedicated fans. Overall, it’s a story of being gutsy sometimes in order to get what you want.
Over the course of the book, the couple goes from being broke in France on their honeymoon — when they’d followed the $5-a-day budget that was popular among Americans in Europe in the 1970s — to owning a multi-story apartment in the Left Bank that took years of renovations to be just right. They eventually agree that the single best day of their lives was the day Jeffrey came home to their new, perfectly customized Paris apartment. It’s a tidy, full-circle story and one that’s meant to inspire.
So then, why didn’t it sit right for me? Ultimately, Garten succeeds because she accepts what comes her way. She takes risks, she says yes, she figures it out after the fact. At least this is what she argues: You have to, as the book’s title states, just be ready when the luck happens. But this — the fundamental premise of the book — is where she loses me: Most of the time when she says luck, what she really means is money. And in the way she tells her story Garten herself seems to lack this awareness.
It’s folly to believe that any “tell-all” is the real truth, but my problem with Be Ready When the Luck Happens was that it felt intellectually dishonest, attributing to luck to what is largely the effect of a very comfortable financial cushion and circumstances that make it hard to fail too much.
Consider that Paris apartment again. One day, while Ina is filming her show in the Hamptons, she receives a call from the apartment’s caretaker: A flooded bathtub in the apartment above theirs has damaged the Gartens’ newly renovated home. “I should have been distraught about the damage; that would have been the normal reaction,” Garten writes. “But, no, all I could think about was the real estate. This was the chambre de bonne above our living room that I had wanted to buy.”
Instead of having the owner cover the damages, the Gartens offer to buy the apartment, allowing them to add on a cupola and expand their second floor. Again, Garten emphasizes a sense of luck: “This time I did know ‘my good breaks from my bad,’ and this was very good!”
This type of thing happens a lot. When Garten fails to make payroll early into her ownership of Barefoot Contessa, she tells Jeffrey, who asks his bosses at Lehman Brothers if he could have the money in his retirement account if he were to quit his job. “The answer was yes, but they thought it was crazy to quit for that reason (as did I!) and offered him a loan,” she writes, comparing it to “something out of one of those wonderful O. Henry stories.”
To be fair, Garten hides neither the fact of the success that she and Jeffrey eventually attain, nor the impressive set of connections that come with it. This keeps the book fun and frothy. Garten’s friend “Jen” is the actress Jennifer Garner, while her friend “Rob” is Chicago director Rob Marshall; at a dinner party, Jeffrey is casually seated next to Nora Ephron. I imagine this is what many people came to this book for in the first place.
Everyone reading the book is aware of the money. We’re reading for escapism, but we live in the real world. So why does Garten pretend that money isn’t the real thing making her decisions possible? She seems clouded by the constant of her stability, to the point that she’s lost sight of the fact that most people cannot ride on this level of financial risk, hoping luck will come their rescue.
This is, to be clear, not a plea for the kind of disclosure culture that’s been fueled by the bad-faith online reader: when authors feel they must pre-empt any statement with acknowledgment of all the things they might not be taking into account. What I mean is that we all learn to narrativize the events of our lives. We come up with the logline, keeping to ourselves the full story and our feelings on it. This seems especially true when one is writing an entire memoir.
Still, ideally, we know when what we’ve narrativized is a little bit bullshit. To me, the best memoirs acknowledge that; they interrogate their own narrative. The risky thing is coming to believe that bullshit yourself.
Garten does herself a disservice by attributing so much to luck; what she downplays is her shrewdness in business and her bullheadedness when needed. Consider another “lucky” moment: Due to a lease dispute, Garten realizes she needs to move her store to a new location. When the space opens up across the street, with a landlord offering her a better lease, she sees the potential for the market of her dreams. But it needs a $150,000 gut renovation and the bank will only give her half.
At the time, Jeffrey was reading Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, the biography of Robert Moses. Knowing the state wouldn’t walk away from half-finished projects, Moses would “routinely underestimate the cost, get started, then go back and say it was going to cost twice as much,” Ina explains. She starts $150,000 worth of work. “…And at the point of no return, I went back to the bank and asked for the rest of the money. Smart, if embarrassingly devious,” Ina writes. Of course, it takes a position of privilege to make a decision like this; what if the bank hadn’t pulled through?
We see a glimmer of more awareness in the epilogue. At the Matrix Awards, which recognize women in communications and the arts, Garten gives a speech to other women in media, talking about how lucky she was at every point in her career. But after returning to her seat on the stage, Oprah, sitting next to her, smacks her on the arm. “You weren’t lucky,” she says. “You make your own luck.” Here, Ina realizes: “My story was about hard work and luck.” It still feels a little flat.
Would I like this book more with a different framing? Yes. Give me the gossip and the fluff and tell me all about the expensive homes and famous friends; I know how to see the unattainable as entertainment. What I struggle with, as a reader, is being able to see something that the author themself so clearly doesn’t want to acknowledge, mistaking for luck what are really the pleasant side effects of wealth.
