Ina Garten’s Signature Ordinariness Is a Response to Her Abusive Childhood

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | September 4, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | September 4, 2024 |

Culinary sweetheart Ina Garten spoke with The New Yorker recently in anticipation of her forthcoming memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens. Garten has long been a national favorite for her warm personality and casual style, and the profile reveals how she came to be that way.

“I think I was starving my whole childhood,” Garten says. Her mother was a dietitian who was “obsessed with what she ate.”

“It was all about nutrition rather than pleasure. My mother didn’t understand pleasure,” she added. Anyone who knows The Barefoot Contessa knows that pleasure is the name of the game.

As for her father, she was “terrified” of him and his “temper tantrums,” which included physical abuse. “He would just have a rage, where he would drag me around the house by my hair,” she said. “He never sexually abused me, but he had this love-hate relationship with me. I think he loved me, but he wanted me to be who he wanted me to be, without any consciousness of who I am.” That experience led her to vow that she would never date anyone who raised their voice to her in the same way. Enter Jeffrey, whom she met in 1964 at Dartmouth College. They’ve now been married for 50 years, though there have been periods of time within those decades where they’ve lived separately and maintained lives independent of one another, a relationship trend becoming more and more common.

Another trend they did before it was cool: not having children. “I remember thinking very clearly, I don’t know why people have children,” Garten says. Of course, her childhood was not always sunshine and roses, which is perhaps why she adds, “I just thought, Why would you re-create that?…I would be terrified.”

It makes sense that someone who was terrified of her parents would be terrified of having children of her own. She says that at some point she and Jeffrey “just didn’t talk about it anymore,” though he acknowledges that it took him a long time to understand the nature of his wife’s relationship with her father.

“After we got married, I noticed great similarities between her and her father,” Jeffrey said. But, he’s quick to add, the secret to her popularity may lie in the fact that “she’s very empathetic.”

“But lots of people are empathetic. She uses that empathy in a practical way,” he says.

Maybe it’s that simple. Or maybe it’s a personal philosophy she’s adopted after a challenging upbringing. When she tried to take her interviewer to a certain restaurant and found it closed, for example, she responded by saying “We can have fun in a closet, it doesn’t matter,” and recoursing to a pizzeria nearby. “Fun,” is, apparently, her “watchword.”

“If it’s not fun, it’s not done,” she said. It sounds trite, but if it works for Ina, it’ll work for me.