Book Review: Be Ready When The Luck Happens By Ina Garten. Reviewed by Dish Stanley

Her memoir’s title implies that Garten’s success has been the product of a lot of luck, but the truth is that Garten has created her luck through exceptionally hard work and by being a bold, decisive risk-taker, not to mention an obsessive perfectionist.

Back in 2000, when my brother was still married to his now ex-wife Claudia, she brought Ina Garten’s Parmesan Smashed Potatoes to a family dinner. The potatoes were revelatory. For one thing, over the previous five years the only ones actually enjoying her cooking were the dogs we fed stealthily under the table. For another, who knew mashed potatoes could have so much flavor and texture? (Beyond the inspired addition of Parmesan, Garten advises to use red potatoes, which are creamier, and she keeps the skin on.)

Claudia had gotten Ina Garten’s cookbook The Barefoot Contessa as a birthday gift. For anyone unfamiliar with Garten’s approach to cookbooks, she is famous for her recipe development, which is to say that she obsessively tests her recipes before publishing them, something that surprisingly few chefs were doing back then. (Her former frenemy (now an outright enemy) Martha Stewart‘s recipes were famously, comically a disaster, in contrast.)

Garten’s first cookbook, The Barefoot Contessa, was published in 1999, and in the 26 years since, Garten has published 22 more cookbooks, closed the gourmet store she first became famous for, become a Food Network TV star, and launched (and shut down) a frozen food line. That’s just her professional life. In her personal life, she has been married to her uxorious husband Jeffrey (a former investment banker and Yale professor), bought and renovated an East Hampton compound, a New York City apartment (or two) and a Paris townhouse. Not to mention becoming friends with an awful lot of cool celebrities. (The one I am most jealous of was Nora Ephron.)

She’s had an enviably happy, fun and exciting life. You can learn all about it in her recent memoir Be Ready When the Luck Happens. (She reads the audible version herself.)

Her memoir’s title suggests that Garten has had a lot of luck, but she’s being sly. She’s mostly created her luck. She’s worked exceptionally hard and been a bold, decisive, calculating risk-taker, not to mention an obsessive perfectionist. She has also remained doggedly committed to her brand, which can be summed up with the words “authenticity” and “approachability.” The casual effortlessness she exudes that is central to both her authenticity and approachability belies her behind-the-scenes, relentlessly driven personality. The success of her “oh, it’s just me, nothing fancy” brand is all the more impressive (or strained, I’d argue) as she has not only become a major celebrity herself, but also surrounded herself with a large cadre of friends who are major celebrities.

Over dinner with friends recently, I compared Ina Garten to a model whose look is ‘the natural look.’ The ‘natural look‘ looks effortless but in actuality, it requires a great deal of effort and expertise.

Garten has had some luck, of course, as the memoir’s title suggests. Her biggest stroke of luck was walking by a window at just the moment that she would be spotted by her beloved husband Jeffrey. It was 1963, she was only fifteen years old and visiting her brother at Dartmouth College. Jeffrey was a junior and after seeing her from afar wrote her a handwritten letter to ask her out on a date. It turns out, we learn, that she grew up in a tough and unloving household and the paternal and supportive Jeffrey saved her from that. In one form or another, he has saved her many times since. Theirs is truly a remarkable, blessed marriage and in many ways the story of their enduring, fulfilling marriage is the real heart of her memoir, just as he is the sustaining love in her life.

There are a lot of lessons to take away from Garten’s life, as conveyed in her memoir. My favorite is a recurring motto she learned from Jeffrey about how to think about things that don’t go as you hoped. “You never know your good breaks from your bad ones,” Jeffrey told her. It is a truth that played out repeatedly for her. For instance, after the lease for her first store in Westhampton didn’t get renewed, she found a better one across the block, and ultimately the best one of all in the former Dean & DeLuca space in Easthampton. Losing the lease for her first tiny store forced her to grow her business in creative and bold ways that she otherwise wouldn’t have, which obviously worked out.

I was reluctant to pick up the memoir myself until a close friend recommended it. That’s because while I religiously rely on her recipes, I had found her bland on her television series. And even though her personal story is inspiring, her determination impressive and her marriage enviable, there were many moments in the memoir that felt overly massaged. For example, in each instance where she’d had some sort of conflict — or even the possible perception of a conflict — the retelling of it felt over-kneaded in an effort to stick to her ‘nice girl next door who got lucky” image. Her explanation of how she ended up with the Dean & DeLuca space in East Hampton by going straight to the landlord and (essentially) outmaneuvering DeLuca felt artfully written (and rewritten). I wasn’t sure why she couldn’t be more matter of fact about outbidding a rival (and friend), but her script felt like she did backflips in order to avoid appearing like the tough and opportunistic business woman she so obviously is.

There were other moments where the doubts she expressed about her ability to pull something off felt entirely disingenuous and manufactured for false drama — like the doubts she expressed over whether she could become a successful cookbook author when “all she’d done up until that point“ was succeed as a celebrity chef and the founder of a hugely successful gourmet food empire. The “Who, me?” struck me as phony.

On that note, last night I wrote a friend to ask whether she had read the memoir.

“Here’s the thing about Ina Garten,” my friend replied in a text. “I saw her interviewed by Danny Meyer at the 92nd Street Y. It was the most boring interview. She had zero interesting things to say outside of cooking and she wasn’t dynamic. She didn’t even come across as a nice person. She came across as a bit of a star fucker who loved milling about with celebrities. And I went because I was a big fan of her and her cookbooks! But I felt like she has created an image of the ‘nice girl next door who got lucky’ and won’t fully own her drive and relentless competitiveness.”

Her comments tracked with my experience reading Be Ready When the Luck Happens. There is so much to admire in Garten, particularly her grit, her ambition and street smarts. Why won’t she own those traits, like (for instance) Martha Stewart does? Why, at this stage, does she continue to stick to her carefully constructed image of the ‘nice girl next door who got lucky?’ Who knows. The reason may be psychological, or it may be yet another cunning move based on well-constructed branding. This late in the meal, though it’s a construct thatfeels like a soufflé that has collapsed.

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