Review: The Best Advice from Ina Garten’s Memoir

Prior to cracking open her book, I knew the Sparknotes version of Garten’s story: After marrying her high school sweetheart, she wound up working for the White House, in a job she hated, before she saw an ad for a Hamptons specialty food store for sale. It was called the Barefoot Contessa, and despite living in Washington, DC, she and Jeffrey decided to go for it. She bought it, built it out, wrote a cookbook, then several others, starred in a cooking show and gradually became a massive Cosmo-making, chambray-wearing household name, beloved by your grandma and Taylor Swift alike for her simple-yet-elegant recipes.

Admittedly, it sounded like a charmed life. And, without knowing her full story, I balked at her fame. She bought someone else’s company and rode that brand to stardom, I thought. Ina, I’m sorry. How little I knew, and how immature of me to assume.

The truth is, she was raised in a mentally—and sometimes physically—abusive household, with her parents’ criticisms searing into her core beliefs about herself, causing her to remark that even to this day, when someone tells her they love her, she feels it’s a “private cosmic joke,” after her father told her no one ever would. She considers her life truly starting the day she met Jeffrey, because he believed in her—so much so that he didn’t just tell her, he showed her. By encouraging that trip to the Hamptons and buying the store when she had no experience in the food industry. And yes, by agreeing to live apart as she focused on the business, leading separate lives when Ina realized the only way she could become her true self was to learn to stand on her own. She’d gone from living with her parents, under their direction, to living with Jeffrey, looking for his. But what did Ina really want out of life?