47 pages • 1 hour read
Ina GartenBe Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 8-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Two for the Road”
With four months until Jeffrey begins graduate school, the newlyweds decide to spend the summer travelling in Europe. Jeffrey determines that they can afford to travel the entire time if they limit themselves to a budget of five dollars per day. The plan is to travel from country to country following their whims, camping every night in order to maintain their budget. For the first time in their lives, Garten and Jeffrey are free from the expectations of their parents, their colleges, and the military. Garten is overwhelmed by this new sense of freedom and the joy she feels in sharing it with Jeffrey.
After picking up their car in Paris, the couple drives to Amsterdam to see the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh and Henri Matisse. They spend one night in a budget hotel, and Ina is bitten by an identified creature. Early the next morning, she buys a thick sleeping bag which she uses for the rest of the summer, despite the heat. The couple travels to Holland, the United Kingdom, and Belgium before returning to France.
Garten identifies their time in France as the moment her world turns to color. As they drive between small towns and villages in the countryside, Jeffrey and Garten stop at open-air markets and experience fresh, local ingredients for the first time. Garten is exposed to a wide variety of cheeses and meats she’s never experienced, and tastes fruit at the peak of seasonal ripeness. She learns how to put together simple meals, and tastes traditional French home cooking, including poulet roti and coq au vin, for the first time. Looking back, Garten identifies their summer in Europe as the happiest time in her life, and the foundation of her future career in food. The chapter ends with a recipe for coq au vin.
Chapter 9 Summary: “It’s that Crazy Ina Garten!”
In the fall, Garten and Jeffrey move to Washington, where Jeffrey begins graduate school. Garten takes a full-time position in the Federal Power Commission, which she describes as boring and bureaucratic. Within a year, she takes another position as an analyst at NASDAQ, investigating fraud. Garten enjoys the job and the freedom it gives her to spend evenings trying new recipes and renovating their new home.
When Jeffrey graduates, he begins a job at the White House and arranges for Garten to take a job at the White House Office of Management and Budget. Garten is initially thrilled by the job, but the realities of politics quickly disillusion her. In one instance, she works hard to advocate for a campaign finance reform bill, only to see politicians use political action committees to work around the law.
Along with her professional frustrations, Garten grows increasingly frustrated in her dynamic with Jeffrey. She realizes that she is trying to emulate his career rather than pursue her individual interests. She also realizes that even though she also works a full-time job, Jeffrey expects her to maintain their household while he expects to control their finances. Despite these frustrations, she is determined to make him happy.
To distract herself from these frustrations, Garten pours herself into finding and renovating the perfect home. When her salary isn’t taken into consideration by their mortgage lenders, she finds a new bank and establishes credit cards in her own name. With the help of friends Dick Erb and Lee Bailey, she also learns to lean into simplicity when hosting, favoring simple recipes over complex ones that keep her from her guests. Garten’s personal creative growth in this time empowers her to leave her established career when she discovers the advertisement for the sale of a Westhampton gourmet food market called Barefoot Contessa.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Starting from Scratch”
On arrival in Westhampton, Garten discovers that the home she rented has been double-leased, and a family is already living there. Miraculously, the family agrees to share the rent and space with Garten for the summer. She takes this as a sign that she will need to be flexible over the summer. Former owner Diana Stratta agrees to stay for one month to help introduce Garten to the business. On her first day, the Thursday before Memorial Day, the store does $87 of business, worrying Garten and Jeffrey. The next day, the summer season begins in the Hamptons and the store sells out completely. Diana explains that she ordered conservatively for the weekend, not wanting to shackle the new owner with too much stock. As a result, Garten and Diana spend the night baking and cooking to restock, while Jeffrey drives to a nearby bakery for more supplies. The three repeat this pattern throughout the weekend.
As the summer progresses, Garten grows more comfortable with the town of Westhampton and the rhythms of the store. She learns that the locals and vacationers enjoy pairing local, fresh dishes with luxurious imports such as wine and cheese. She caters local events, earning a reputation among the elite in Westhampton. On Wednesdays, she drives round-trip to New York City to pick up fresh stock from small suppliers in the city, logging 20-hour days. Garten is exhausted but loves the challenge of solving new problems every day. However, the demanding schedule begins to wear on her relationship with Jeffrey, who seems to expect that she will return to Washington and her role as his wife when the summer ends. Empowered by running a business and establishing a career she loves, Garten is frustrated that she is also expected to keep house for Jeffrey. As the summer comes to a close, she asks Jeffrey for a separation.
Chapter 11 Summary: “1,000 Baguettes and the Business End of a Gun”
When the summer ends, Garten moves to New York City on her own and falls into a deep depression, unable to pull herself out of bed. Jeffrey insists that she return to Washington, explaining that he is leaving the country on a six-month trip and that she can stay alone in their apartment while he’s gone. Before he leaves, Jeffrey asks Garten what he can do to make her come home. Garten tells him to go to therapy, and he agrees, stopping at her family’s therapist in Connecticut on the way to the airport.
After six months, Jeffrey and Garten meet in Palm Springs, California to discuss their marriage. Garten insists that the traditional housekeeping roles of a wife do not align with her new career, while Jeffrey admits that he wants a career where he can travel, but feels compelled to stay home and take care of Garten. They agree to shed the marriage roles they were raised with and support each other as they pursue independent goals.
In New York, Garten is exposed to a growing American food scene and exciting new specialty stores. She takes cooking classes with Lydie Marshall, who later becomes a famous cookbook author in her own right. Garten takes inspiration from her time in New York back to Barefoot Contessa, where her second summer is even more successful than the first. The store becomes the heart of Westhampton and is visited by celebrities like singer-songwriter Peter Yarrow and feminist leader and journalist Gloria Steinem. Although she faces some challenges, and workers come and go, the business continues to grow. At the end of her third summer at Barefoot Contessa, she is forced to vacate by the landlord, who was unaware of the change in ownership. With Jeffrey’s help, she secures a ten-year lease in a historic building across the street.
Chapters 8-11 Analysis
This section of Be Ready When the Luck Happens details important changes in author Ina Garten’s relationship with Jeffrey, her husband and best friend. The opening chapters of the memoir suggest that her relationship with Jeffrey was an unconscious attempt to escape from the abuse and restriction she felt at home. As she ages, this dynamic becomes clear to her, and she makes the connection explicit, explaining that it was her husband who “‘brought me up,’ as my parents had done such a dreadful job” (103). Where has her parents “had made me feel worthless and belittled” (103), Jeffrey gave Garten “confidence and taught me how to be strong in the world” (103). These passages explicitly suggest that Garten saw her relationship with Jeffrey as not only an escape from her parents, but a substitute for the kind of nurturing relationship she did not have with them.
For the first few years of their marriage, Garten finds comfort in this dynamic. As she attempts to discover her own interests and establish her own career, however, she begins to suspect that “there was the sense in our marriage that he was the parent, and I was the child” (103). Garten’s sense that she is not an equal partner in her relationship grows when she realizes that Jeffrey expects her to do domestic labor in addition to her day job: “after a long day at the office, I made dinner, took care of the laundry, and did countless other chores, and I began to resent it” (103). Although seemingly very different, both the parent/child and the husband/wife dynamic Garten experienced with Jeffrey rely on the assumption that he is in charge. It is the assumption that Jeffrey is in charge that bothers Garten, rather than the reality of cooking and keeping house for him. As she explains, she “didn’t like that it was assumed that I would make dinner, nor did I like that it was assumed Jeffrey would manage our finances and pay the bills” (103). Just as her choice to marry Jeffrey against her parents’ wishes demonstrated The Importance of Instinct and Self-Determination, she must now uphold these values again within her marriage, bucking patriarchal expectations to chart her own path. Her separation from Jeffrey, whom she loves deeply, suggests that she is willing to make significant sacrifices in pursuit of self-determination.
Garten implies that her problems with Jeffrey are rooted in the culture in which they were raised, not in any flaws in his personality. She argues that he “hadn’t done anything wrong” (139) but was simply “doing what every man before him had done” (139) in expecting his wife to maintain a home and perform domestic labor like cooking. Ultimately, the couple is only able to reunite after Jeffrey agrees to release these expectations, allowing Garten to pursue her own career. Garten suggests that moving beyond traditional gender roles was “liberating” (141) for Jeffrey as well: Although “he wanted a job where he traveled for work” (141) he felt shackled by the idea that he “should stay home because he was the husband and had to be responsible” (141) for Garten. Reframing their relationship as “equals who took care of each other” (141) empowered both Jeffrey and Garten to achieve their goals. By removing the gendered power dynamics from their relationship, they were able to offer each other The Value of Unconditional Love and Support.
These chapters introduce Julia Child as another important influence in Garten’s life. Child appears throughout the memoir as a recurring motif related to the development of Garten’s career as a chef, television personality, and food industry titan. In these early chapters, she appears as a symbol of Garten’s ambitions as a chef. When describing her transformative first summer in France, Garten compares a pivotal meal of coq au vin to “a similar moment [Julia Child had] eating sole meunière—sole in butter sauce—in Normandy” (91). Garten claims that “I totally understand what happened to her, because the same thing happened to me” (91). This is a pivotal moment in the narrative of Child’s life, and by explicitly connecting it to her own experience, Garten frames Child as a peer, rather than an icon.
A few chapters later, however, Garten refers to Child again in order to distinguish herself from the older generation of chefs to which Child belongs. In Washington, DC, Garten realizes that “complicated dinners from Julia Child’s books, like roast leg of lamb and tomatoes stuffed with duxelles” (108) required a “frenzy of planning” (108) and leave her “totally exhausted” (108). The simple, comforting food Garten develops at the Barefoot Contessa is imagined as an “earthy and elegant” (129) alternative to the tradition of Julia Child.
