NEW YORK – Long before Ina Garten's Barefoot Contessa mini-empire of bestselling cookbooks and TV shows ever took off, she found herself at an airport, wanting to learn to fly.
It was the late 1960s and she was a newlywed in Fayetteville, North Carolina. She and her soldier-husband, Jeffrey, would often pass a small private airport and Garten was intrigued.
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She marched into the terminal to find out about taking flying lessons. “I’m really sorry,” the guy at the desk told her, “but we don’t have anybody who’ll teach a girl how to fly.”
Do you think that stopped Ina Garten?
The story of how she refused to budge until she got lessons in a cockpit is included in her new memoir, "Be Ready When the Luck Happens," which distills stories from her life into lessons for foodies and non-foodies, alike.
“I wanted it to be fun to read because otherwise nobody would read this,” she tells The Associated Press. “I wanted it to be stories from my life, but I also wanted each story to have a point — in the way you could take a recipe away and make a chocolate cake, I want you to take the idea away and be able to use it in your life.”
Revisiting key moments and her marriage
The memoir — written with help from writer Deborah Davis — is packed with stories of Garten pushing for her vision, not least when in 1978 she spotted an ad in The New York Times and on a whim bought a little specialty food store in the Hamptons called Barefoot Contessa.
At the time, she was 30, writing policies on nuclear energy at the White House and had never worked in food, outside of re-selling Dunkin’ Donuts to hungry students in her dorm room in college.
“It sounded a little crazy, but I was out of my mind with excitement. I didn't know if it would be the best decision or the worst mistake I ever made,” she writes of the store, named after a 1954 Ava Gardner movie but perfectly summing up her philosophy of both elegant and earthy.
Garten would, of course, turn it into a global, inviting brand thanks to her keen eye for quality and dedication to sourcing the finest ingredients. She also put in the long hours, learning each dish and even sleeping in the store.
“The process of writing the book really kind of gave me confidence that this wasn’t just luck — that I had actually worked really hard for it with determination and vision,” she says “I stuck with what I wanted. And my life has turned out so much better than I could have even dreamed.”
Fans know much of her story already since her cookbooks are filled with personal anecdotes, but they may not know about her chilly childhood in Connecticut.
She describes her father as abusive at times, a man who told her when she was 15 that no one would ever love her. Her mother was distant and used food as a source of control, serving broiled chicken or fish with canned peas and carrots. “I spent my early life searching — no, begging — for flavor,” she writes.
That early nightmare helped her down the road. “My childhood, because it was so painful, it gave me enormous empathy for people,” she says. That meant she could read customers, putting herself in their shoes.
Readers will also learn for the first time about her six-month separation from Jeffrey, which took them to the brink of divorce. Their relationship has lately been heralded on social media — #couplegoals or #relationshipgoals — as an ideal partnership, but Gartner reveals it took work.
After finding her new career path, Garten rebelled at the traditional domestic chores expected of her — cooking, cleaning, shopping, managing. “When I bought Barefoot Contessa, I shattered our traditional roles — took a baseball bat to them and left them in pieces,” she writes. Following some time apart, the couple agreed to meet each other halfway.
“There are lessons that any reader can find throughout, specifically about persistence and trusting yourself and your instincts and also taking chances,” says Gillian Blake, executive vice president, publisher and editor-in-chief of Crown & Currency.
“I think there’s a thematic resonance between the way she’s taught people how to cook and the way she teases out these inspirational lessons for larger life questions.”
Taylor Swift, Elmo and courage
Garten may be known for her approachability, but she admits to having a stubborn streak — “a barrier to me isn’t a stop sign; it’s a call to action,” she writes — and she isn’t a blushing flower. She once worked in the backroom of a strip club.
She writes that she faced off both a robber at gunpoint who wanted $50 and a bank officer who wouldn’t make a loan to her business because she was a woman and likely would soon have babies.
There are also lighter stories about a memorable lunch with Mel Brooks, and meeting Elmo, Jennifer Garner and Taylor Swift, plus a boozy tale of playing beer bong with soccer star Abby Wambach.
There are practical lessons — like standing up for yourself, even when it’s hard or taking a risk. Find just one person who really believes in you, she argues.
"People who are well known and successful aren’t there because they are smarter, more creative. It’s because they hit a wall and they just said, ‘I don’t even see the wall. I’m going to get around the wall. I really want to do this and I’m going to figure it out,’" she says.
“One thing I learned by doing the book, which surprised me, is I had a lot more courage than I thought I had. And I realized that those things that I did with courage were the making of my life.”