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.
Key Figures
Ina Garten
Ina Garten (born Ina Rosenberg on February 2, 1948) is the author and protagonist of Be Ready When the Luck Happens. The memoir follows Garten’s life from her childhood in a physically and emotionally abusive home to her successful career as a chef and icon of the food industry. Garten depicts herself as a self-assured creative who uses all the tools at her disposal to advance her career. Despite this desire to succeed, Garten also emphasizes her personal relationships with others in the food industry.
Garten suggests that the “cycle of neglect and abuse” she experienced in her childhood inspired her to challenge herself professionally (16). Throughout her childhood, Garten’s parents made it clear that they “didn’t believe in me or my potential,” (16); despite this, they held Garten and her brother Ken “to impossibly high (and arbitrary) standards” (16). As a result, Garten believed that her ideas weren’t good and that anything she tried would fail. These passages highlight the absurdity of her parents’ emotional abuse: They hold her to high standards while insisting that she can never meet them. As a result, Garden enters high school with low self-esteem.
As a result of her parents abuse, Garten is forced to envision “a completely different life from the one I was living” (8). Although she doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life, she knows that leaving her home is essential: “I wanted the freedom to figure out who I was, then I’d take it from there” (31). This process of self-discovery takes years, but once Garten realizes that her passion lies in food, she is unstoppable. From buying Barefoot Contessa to pitching her cookbook and remodeling a Paris apartment, Garten follows her own instincts: “I wanted to do what I wanted to do without any barriers standing in my way” (62). Garden’s confidence is essential to her success, and the importance of self-assurance is a key theme in the memoir.
Throughout her career, Garten uses all the tools available to her in order to succeed professionally. The memoir depicts her as an early adopter of several technologies that helped her business grow. As owner of Barefoot Contessa, she hires an NYU computer programmer to design a program for calculating the cost of any item she wants to make and sell. This program leads her to increase the price of brownies from 75¢ to $2.50—a change that leads to her realization that her customers will pay for quality. Two decades later, before leaving the store, Garten designs a website for the new owners. Although in 1996 “the internet was a big question mark” (194), Garten’s foresight led her to believe that a website would be a necessity in the near future. These anecdotes depict Garten as a forward-thinking, tech-savvy businessperson.
Although the memoir depicts Garten as a shrewd businesswoman, she is also depicted as empathetic and generous to her competitors. When she has the opportunity to take over the lease for Dean & Deluca, a competing specialty food store, she calls one of the owners, Joel Dean, explaining that she “knew him professionally and I didn’t want him to think that I would just rent his store out from under him” (172). Garten attempts to work with Dean in order to preserve his control of the lease, believing that it was “the right thing to do” (173), but Dean insists that she take it. When she shares news of the new store with Anna, a former employee who left to open her own store nearby, Garten is “expecting her to react positively, the way I had when she opened Loaves & Fishes” (174). Garten is shocked by Anna’s negative reaction. This anecdote suggests that Garten does not see business as a zero-sum game, but rather believes that they can both succeed by supporting each other. This empathetic, cooperative attitude is essential to Garten’s image of herself as businesswoman.
Jeffrey Garten
Jeffrey Garten (born October 29, 1946) is the husband of Ina Garten and an important character in Be Ready When the Luck Happens. The two meet when Garten is 16 and Jeffrey 18, and they form an immediate connection: Jeffrey later claims that he saw Garten and “in an instant, was smitten!” (24). She describes him as “the handsomest boy I’d ever seen” (26), with “curly hair, a wide smile, and bright, engaging eyes that pulled me in” (26). Jeffrey is characterized as an unconditionally supportive partner for Garten who brings out the best in her typically cold and abusive parents.
Jeffrey offers emotional and financial support throughout Garten’s career, allowing her to make risky choices that might otherwise be inaccessible. When Garten is considering leaving her prestigious job at the White House, Jeffrey encourages her to “pick something you love to do” (6), reckoning that “if you love it, you’ll be really good at it” (6). He also tells her not to “worry about whether you make money” (6). These passages reflect the emotional and financial support Jeffrey offers throughout her career, as he encourages her to take risks, insisting that she will succeed and promising to support her if she doesn’t. Garten depicts Jeffrey’s support as a stark contrast to her parents abuse, noting that “for the first time in my life, someone believed in me and knew I would make the right decision” (61). Jeffrey echoes this sentiment, telling Garten when they meet that he “thought you needed someone to take care of you” (29). These passages acknowledge Jeffrey’s role as an essential source of support for Garten throughout their lives.
Jeffrey’s supportive, open nature also means that he brings out the best in Garten’s parents, especially her cruel, abusive father. Jeffrey has an “idealized image” (32) of Garten’s family, seeing them as a model example of the nuclear family. Garten notices that “when he was there, that’s who they were” (32): kind, loving, and outwardly supportive of Garten and her brother Ken. Charles Rosenberg’s love for Jeffrey has a tangible effect on their relationship with their daughter: As Garten explains, “he had enormous respect for Jeffrey, the dream son-in-law, and Jeffrey had chosen me, so he was forced to start seeing me the way Jeffrey saw me” (46). The fact that Garten is able to mend her relationship with her father with Jeffrey’s support demonstrates his positive effect on Garten’s parents.
Charles Rosenberg
Charles Rosenberg is the father of Ina Garten, and an important negative influence in her life. He is not named in the novel; Garten refers to him only as “my father.” Garten describes her father as “classically tall, dark, and handsome, a Clark Gable type” (13) whose friendly exterior hid a controlling, violent, and cruel personality. Garten remembers her father as “a giant personality [with] a wonderful sense of humor” (13) who “loved his friends and was happiest when he could pull up a chair at the center of a group and tell stories to entertain them” (13). She attributes his success as a doctor to the fact that he “loved chatting with his patients and gave them far more attention than their appointments allowed” (13). These descriptions suggest a charming, sociable man capable of charming everyone around him.
Despite the gregarious side he shows to patients and neighbors, Garten’s father can also be controlling, violent, and cruel. As a child, Garten knows better than to challenge her father: “even questioning what [he] expected me to wear, or when to do my homework, was totally unacceptable” (1). If she does challenge her father, she faces violent retribution: Garten writes that her father would “hit me or pull me around by my hair” (16) when he got angry. This physical abuse is often paired with emotional abuse that causes Garten moments of doubt throughout her life. When Garten quits golf lessons, her “father’s overreaction was that with my attitude, no one would ever love me, and he was sure no one would want to marry me” (19). Charles’s controlling, violent, and cruel behavior offers a stark contrast to Jeffrey’s supportive nature, and has an equally important influence on Garten’s life, as she strives to overcome the doubt his behavior planted in her as a child.
Florence Rosenberg
Florence Rosenberg is the mother of Ina Garten, and an important negative influence in her life. As with her father Charles, Garten does not name Florence in the memoir, instead referring to her simply as “my mother.” Florence is characterized as a cold, distant mother who is obsessed with appearances and has difficulty forming emotional connections with others, including her children. Garten writes that her mother was “all about checking boxes and keeping up appearances” (11), and that she found it difficult to meet her mother’s high expectations. Florence needed to feel “in control of her image, her thoughts, her feelings, and her children,” (14) and grew frustrated by the fact that, as Garten notes, “children can’t always be controlled” (14). These passages reflect Garten’s belief that she and her brother Ken were the source of her mother’s unhappiness, as she could not reconcile her need for control with her children’s naturally unruly nature. She also suggests that Charles’s violent outbursts had a negative influence on Florence. Florence was “terrified of his outbursts” (16), and Garten believes that her strict adherence to rules is Florence’s “way of maintaining order and control” (16).
Florence is also depicted as someone who struggles to form emotional connections, and Garten finds an empathetic explanation for this, too. Garten describes her mother as “not social” (14), writing that “there was something missing that prevented her from really connecting with people” (14). Garten’s brother Ken, a doctor, diagnoses their mother as “an anxious depressive with a spectrum disorder” (14). Garten’s depiction of her mother reflects her empathy as a writer, as she is willing to accept that her mother’s behavior may have stemmed in part from circumstances she could not control.
