Ina Garten Reveals Details of Her Abusive Childhood

Ina Garten has published dozens of books in her decades-long career as a celebrity chef, but her latest project is poised to be a blockbuster. Released on October 1, Be ready when luck strikes is Garten’s debut memoir, featuring heartbreaking new details about surviving an abusive childhood in Stamford, Connecticut.

“I got through my childhood with sheer determination,” Contessa Barefoot speak Everybody in an interview. “It was the 50s: it was a different era. My dad used to say, parenting is not a popularity contest. It just goes to show that what he wanted us to do, we should do.”

Garten, born in Brooklyn in 1948, described a “horrific” home environment where her father would have what she called “rages” in which she feared for her life. Meanwhile, her mother was “controlling” and “didn’t know how to have relationships.”

“[My father] just in a rage, he would drag me around the house by my hair,” she said. New Yorker“He never sexually abused me, but he had a love-hate relationship with me. I thought he loved me, but he wanted me to be who he wanted me to be, without any sense of who I was.”

But when Garten got married in 1968, everything changed: she was free. She moved to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, with her new husband, Jeffrey, who had served in the Army during the Vietnam War for four years. The couple then moved to Washington, DC, where Ina worked at the White House, and eventually to Westhampton Beach, New York, where she opened her iconic Barefoot Contessa boutique in 1978.

Garten eventually “reconciled” with her father, who “apologized in his own way.” (He died in 2004.) But she never forgot the details of her childhood and will recount them all in her upcoming memoir.

“I think if there’s a threat of violence, you’re always afraid,” she said. “Even if it’s not happening. So I basically spent my entire childhood in my bedroom with the door closed. It was protection. It was to keep myself safe.”