Ina Garten's Memoir Reads like a Smoothie

Grey Battle reviews Be Ready When the Luck Happens 

Garten’s prose is sweet, chunky, and easy to slurp down. It’s as if she recorded herself speaking about a life from beginning to end and, then, uploaded the transcript to Chat GPT. “Please, turn this into a memoir,” I imagine she typed, the AI robot spitting back three-hundred-and-three pages of goop.

If Garten did write her own memoir, perhaps the problem is recipe-writing techniques turned habitual. She tells us how she learned to write like a non-human, when she created the first Barefoot Contessa cookbook. 

“I sent the book to my editor, who really taught me how to write a recipe. I’d write, ‘Put the butter in the bottom of the pan,’ and he would write, ‘Where else could you put it?’ and delete ‘the bottom of’. I loved that part of the process! He taught me to put the ingredients in descending order, with the salt and pepper last. I developed a sense of how to write a recipe as concisely as possible without missing a word of instruction.”

The sentences do lack detail and the memoir does, in fact, follow a descending order. Garten begins with her challenging upbringing, dives into marital turmoil, the start of her business, and finishes with a sprinkle of celebrity interviews and Instagram fame. The lack of substance leaves the reader full, but with nothing to chew on.

An example is Garten’s discussion of gender roles in her marriage. She and Jeffrey, her husband, endured a short-lived divorce.

“I just couldn’t live with him in a traditional ‘man and wife’ relationship, which seemed to be what he wanted… Jeffrey hadn’t done anything wrong. He was just doing what every man before him had done. But we were living in a new era, and that behavior wasn’t okay with me anymore. I had changed.” 

It strikes me as a grand assumption that “every man” has acted in a particular way, and universality should absolve the individual man of blame. Garten, here, places the blame of the marriage hiccup on herself. Barefoot Contessa had incited a sort of awakening, and she became frustrated with the barriers imposed by traditional wifery. 

After a difficult conversation, there is a plan made to shift the structure of the couple’s home life. Yet, even after the marriage resumes on this basis, the problem of gender and power seems to persist. When Garten becomes quite successful, she calls her work “my small retail food store job,” while referring to Jeffrey’s occupation as “his big-deal investment banking job.”

To be fair, Garten’s internalized bias reaches past the dynamics of her marriage. When she tells us about Barefoot Contessa’s move into a space formerly owned by two men, she writes, “There was a rumor that Barefoot Contessa had pushed out Dean and DeLuca, which was untrue, and, if anyone bothered to think about it, extremely unrealistic, like a mouse clobbering an elephant. 

The remnants of her marital power imbalance is made clear through later scenes in the memoir. After Garten’s parents visit, for example, Jeffrey (who supposedly never critiques her) decides to chastise her for hosting (for the very first and only time, Garten says).

“The weekend of their visit was one of those brutal summer weekends at the store when I came home exhausted, inert, the worst hostess, I didn’t– no, I couldn’t!- lift a finger. I didn’t cook for them, didn't take them on a tour of East Hampton. Nothing. After they left, Jeffrey— who is never critical of me— suggested that maybe I could have been more attentive. He was totally right. I felt terrible when he pointed out that I didn’t even buy flowers for the house when they were there.”

Garten, working herself to the bone in a new food store, is hosting parents who emotionally and physically abused her for years prior. I would be surprised to read, given the circumstances, she was an attentive hostess. I am more surprised to read that she is made to regret inattentiveness. I wonder if there’s a version of Garten who would answer, “Jeffrey, why don’t you buy the flowers?”

Her 2016 cookbook, Cooking for Jeffrey, is a collection of recipes that, according to the summary on the back cover, Jeffrey “requests” most often.

The memoir glosses over complex struggle and emotions, smooth but ultimately unsatisfying to read. Maybe it was Garten’s co-writer and editors who blended her experiences into paste, precluding any bite too tough to swallow.

However, Garten herself alludes to a pleasure she takes in turning serious problems into happiness, which she says can be done at little cost. According to the Barefoot Contessa return policy, if a customer disliked what they bought, they would be given their money back, asked what they did not like about the original product, and given another, better item for free.

“A serious problem turned into a happy customer for life and the cost to us was minimal.”

In her memoir, Garten is happily familiar. Her stories make success seem simple, any of us could do-it-ourselves in our own home kitchen. She creates an artificial life, one which happens to also meet the principles of her best-selling cookbook.

“I wanted you to open [the cookbook], look at a photograph (because I think most people are visual), and say, ‘Oh my God, that looks delicious!’ Then, I wanted you to read the recipe and think, It’s easy enough that I can make it myself. And third, I wanted you to go through the list of ingredients and say, ‘I can actually get all of them at the grocery store.’ No black garlic. No trip to India for some spice. Funny, thirteen books later, I still feel exactly the same way.”

Yes, she included pictures in the memoir, too.

Garten wants us to believe that there is no skill required to her success. In the epilogue, she tries to respond to celebrities who called her out on what I’ll refer to as the smoothie-making of her personal history.

Sharyn Alfonsi tells Garten that her success is due to “hard work, shrewd business sense, and leaving nothing to chance.” Oprah says, “You weren’t lucky. You make your own luck.” Garten resolves these questions by concluding that she does not make luck, she is simply ready when it happens—something we can all do!

There are times when we get snippets of Garten’s voice, frozen blueberries that escaped the blade. “Slightly insane” is how she describes the script-making of her television show. During another filming period she recounted asking herself, “Where the fuck are my coffeepot and the toaster?!”

We find that she may be, in fact, less relaxed than the name of her brand, Barefoot Contessa, implies: “I’m a perfectionist with high expectations, so if the result is anything less than perfect it’s a total disaster to me.” A brand name that we should be keen to remember, Garten inherited when she quit her job as a nuclear policy analyst for the White House and bought the store from an Italian countess.

Garten keeps her drive, talent, and grit fairly hidden amongst pages filled with happy accidents. In some passages, we get the sense there may be more lurking underneath the guise.

“The part of me that thrives on a challenge is always looking ahead to the next one— the puzzle that keeps me thinking, the problem I want to solve, the goal I’d do anything to accomplish, the idea that sticks in my head and gets my adrenaline pumping.”

Garten, describing the process of pitching her first cookbook, writes, “It’s hard to get support for a vision that’s seen as risky.” Garten may believe that detailing the risks she took, confessing to self-confidence might turn readers off, but that’s precisely what we need. Because if I went to the grocery, blended the listed ingredients up to her instruction, I doubt I would be left with the picture Garten published.

Garten might say I should just declare myself ready for some luck, but readiness itself hints at a story she did not tell. The memoir offers an illusion of simplicity while hiding the individual ingredients which made it all come together.