I Couldn’t Put Down Ina Garten’s New Memoir—And This Is the One Sentence Everyone Needs to Absorb

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?

"It was the hardest thing I ever did,” Ina writes in her memoir. “Haltingly, I told him that I needed to be on my own. I didn't say whether it was for now...or forever.”

This was in the ‘70s, in her early days of running Barefoot Contessa. Jeffrey listened quietly, taking in her words, before telling her, “If you feel like you need to be on your own, you need to do it,” she shares.

“I’d asked the only man I’d ever loved for a separation, knowing that I was taking a terrible risk. I needed to find myself, but was I really ready to lose him in the process?” Ina wound up throwing herself into her work, often getting up at 3 a.m. to bake 1,000 baguettes (literally) when her baker called out, and on at least one occasion, sleeping in the store overnight. There was no buying a brand and riding its growing popularity to fame; she had to learn the business, then build the empire from there.