Be Ready When the Luck Happens

by Ina Garten

Then it occurred to me that there was something in between doing it and not doing it. What if I kept moving, but I did it my way?

Challenges, disappointments, heartbreaks, problems that hit like a ton of bricks, days when I didn’t want to get out of bed. The solution is rarely obvious, and it’s never a straight line up and over the hill.

And, inevitably, the daily question I dreaded the most from my father: “What did you accomplish today?” If I proudly said that I’d won a tennis tournament or made a fisherman knit sweater, as I liked to do, he’d say, “Those are things you wanted to do, but did you accomplish anything?” I was confused. Why couldn’t succeeding involve something you enjoyed doing?

The story, which I’ve told countless times, usually begins with “I was fifteen,” until I learned another interesting thing about writing a memoir: Your own life can be full of surprises. The stories we tell repeatedly don’t always hold up to fact-checking. When I did the math for the first time in decades, I was stunned to realize that I was sixteen, not fifteen, on that fateful day.

I think I didn’t see myself as independent. I was somebody’s wife or daughter, not a woman who could live on her own, despite Marlo Thomas’s example.

A more believable explanation is that the baguette debuted in 1919, after a new labor law prohibited bakers from working between the hours of ten p.m. and four a.m., presumably to give them time to sleep. The problem was that if bakers wanted to have bread to sell to their early-morning customers, they had to come up with a loaf they could bake quickly. The fast-cooking baguette was the solution, and it became so popular that, along with the Eiffel Tower and the beret, it’s probably one of the first things we think of when we think of France.

Women everywhere were rethinking their roles and responsibilities. Yes, we had new opportunities in the 1970s, but it began to dawn on us that we were expected to add them to whatever we did in our traditional roles. It wasn’t having it all, it was doing it all.

Gail Sheehy’s Passages. I’d read it in my twenties, when it was a big bestseller, but I just couldn’t connect with it then. This time, I understood what Sheehy was talking about—me! Her research found that women who grew up in the 1950s, before women had some independence, didn’t have female role models to look up to, so they chose to be like the men they admired most.

Don’t worry, Passages assured me, your twenties are the time when you master what you think you’re supposed to do. But in your thirties, when you’ve figured out what you like and don’t like, and you’re more confident, you can move on to what you really want to do, which might be totally different.

Buying the store was my answer to the question the teenage me didn’t dare ask when my father demanded to know what I’d accomplished that day. At the time, I wondered why doing what you loved couldn’t be an accomplishment. Now food and cooking—my hobby, my escape, my obsession, and definitely what I loved doing—was about to become my business and, if all went well, my accomplishment.

A therapist many years later told me her theory of marriage. When you’re young, you marry someone who has the qualities you wish you had. In my case, I was drawn to Jeffrey because he was smart and serious. He was a “grown-up.” He did the same thing, seeing me as someone who was always fun and happy—the life of the party. As you grow older, one of two things happens. Either you start to find those differences increasingly annoying and you grow apart, or—and this is what was happening to us—you gradually become more like each other, even as you remain who you are. With time, Jeffrey became lighter, while I became more serious without losing my sense of fun. Eventually, we found our balance.

One thing I learned, and continue to learn every day, is that the food we enjoy most connects to our deepest memories of when we felt happy, comfortable, nurtured. It could be something from childhood

or a taste that somehow made us feel good, even if we didn’t know why. I wanted to re-create those nostalgic sensations, with fresher ingredients, and make them even better than remembered.

Cecily made me realize that the highly critical voice in my head was actually my parents’ voice, not mine. It’s really hard to separate yourself from that voice, but I started telling myself, That’s what my mother would have said. Everything you’ve done has come out better than you could have imagined, so listen to your own voice.

Cecily helped me to understand that the past wasn’t my only problem. How I was dealing with it, or more accurately, not dealing with it, was making me unhappy. There’s a wonderful quote attributed to George Lucas: “We’re all living in cages with the door wide open.” That was me until I realized I had the power—and the responsibility—to set myself free. To step out of the cage of whatever I’d experienced in the past, to think for myself, and to believe in my choices.

The last party I booked was a friend’s wedding, and it was a doozie. There is a British comedy called Noises Off where act 1 is a play within the play—perfectly calm and lovely. In act 2, they turn the stage around, and you see the bedlam and chaos going on backstage—people fighting and being pushed onstage. The final act of the play is the original play again (act 1), but now you know what’s actually going on backstage and it’s hilarious. Catering always seemed to me like Noises Off. My goal was always that the client never saw the chaos, only how beautiful their party was.

Cooking for me isn’t an end; it’s a means to an end. I cook for people I love, and when you cook, everyone shows up. How many times has someone called you and said, “Come for dinner!” and you said, “Nah, I don’t really want a home-cooked dinner and an evening around the table with friends”? Never!

I use the words flavor and texture a lot, and I’d like to describe what I mean. The quick answer is that flavor is what we taste when we eat something, and texture is how it feels while we’re eating it.

I saw that my friend Erin French from the Lost Kitchen in Maine did something with soup that was really interesting. Before she poured the soup into the bowl, she placed delicious garnishes in the center, then poured the puréed soup around the garnishes. I tried the same thing—I put cubed creamy goat cheese, big toasted croutons, and crumbled bacon in the middle of shallow soup bowls and poured the puréed potato fennel soup around it. Now, instead of baby food, each spoonful is a choose-your-own-adventure when the creamy soup combines with each crunchy, flavorful garnish, and it’s never boring.

Sixty thousand exuberant fans cheered Taylor’s every move, but it wasn’t only her singing that impressed me.

One thing in particular that she said has really stayed with me. She said, “We all get so upset about what’s said about us on the internet and social media, but the truth is, what we tell ourselves about ourselves is so much worse.”

My friend Erin French from the restaurant the Lost Kitchen in Maine once wrote, “Sometimes you have to trust that the hard times, the pain and the tragedies in life have purpose. They may make no sense at the time, may bring you to your knees and you will wonder why this hell is happening and if you’ll ever get through it. But trust is your trajectory, sending you along your path, and if you listen, learn, heal and grow along the way, things will one day make sense.”

It was a process—even the best marriages are not easy or perfect, and there will always be “for better or for worse” times. What carries you through is how you feel about each other and mutual respect. My friend Maile Carpenter, the remarkable editor of Food Network Magazine, who’s wise beyond her years, told me that the definition of a good marriage is that each person thinks they got the better deal.

Here’s what I’ve learned from my own difficult childhood. It’s true that what goes in early goes in deep. I will never truly lose that critical voice in my head that says, “Don’t do it, it will turn out badly,” for as long as I live. But I also think that those years of debilitating fear taught me enormous compassion, maybe even for my parents.

I finished and took my seat on the stage, right next to Oprah. Immediately, she turned and smacked me on the arm, saying, “You weren’t lucky. You make your own luck.”