Ina Garten

speaker

688 appearances 6 recordings 4 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard 27 Jan

Ina Garten’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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The Oprah Podcast · Oprah and Ina Garten Share the Secrets to a Successful Life · 24 Dec 2024 podcast

Can I just sit with that for a second? Thank you. Yes.

Yes.

You know, I think I never really made a decision to write it. I just decided I would start. And I was working with a friend of mine whose name is Deborah Davis, and she's an amazing researcher. And she would interview me and record what I was telling her, the stories I was telling her. But she took me back to places I'd been and asked me about it. And I recalled things I didn't remember.

But I think when I started, I said to her, let's just start this. I'm really not sure it's going to be interesting because it's my life. I've lived it. I never look back. And I said, at any point that I think it's not interesting enough for people to read, then I want to just pull the plug. And she said, fine, let's just start. I think she knew it was going to be more interesting than I thought.

But the process of doing it changed how I feel about my life. It was just quite extraordinary. Tell me how so. I thought, well, you and I are going to talk about this, I'm sure, because I always thought I'd been incredibly lucky in my life. And I also thought I did this, and then I did that, and I did something else, and I figured it out, but I don't know how I did it.

And when I had to go back and look at my whole life, I realized that connecting the dots... It was really easy. I continued to do the same thing over and over again. I kind of challenged myself at each time. But at the moment that I started doing a specialty food store, I realized I had already figured I taught myself how to cook. So I actually was ready. Yes.

I didn't think I'd done the work, but I actually had. And so... Writing the book made me realize that I was prepared for each stage that I got to.

Maybe it was a love tap. It was a love tap. I don't remember slapping you. You were just like, whoa, wait a minute. You make your own luck. And I was like, no, I've just been really lucky.

The title came from a very dear friend of mine, Rob Marshall, who's the Broadway and movie director, was when he was on Broadway, I think he was 23 or 24, he was the dance captain for Liza Minnelli's show. And Liza said to him, be ready when the luck happens. And he never forgot it. And what she was saying is, do the work. So when the luck happens, you're ready for it. Preparation. And I was...

Almost done with the book. I didn't have a title. I was just coming to terms with the idea that I actually, yes, I'd been lucky, but I was ready when it happened. I'd done the work so that I was ready when it happened. And I thought, oh, my God, that's what my life has been about. is getting ready, so I'm there when a lot happens. And that's why, so I asked if I could use that as a title.

And that's why I told the story. I know you have the same experience. It's in a different format, but still we have the same experience. I wanted people not to know that I had a terrible childhood. Certainly people have had worse childhoods than I did. But I wanted them to know that you can...

You can make a decision with enormous determination and change your life and not make that the definition of your life. And I just remember when I was 15, I remember making that decision. I wasn't going to live like this. That if I was dating somebody who so much has raised his voice to me, I was out of there.

That I wanted to be with somebody who was supportive and positive, and I wanted to surround myself with people that were positive.

And, you know, it's interesting because when Jeffrey, I met Jeffrey when I was 17 and he thought I had the perfect family. Yes, yes. And he thought, you know, my father was a doctor. My mother ran a real estate business. I mean, it all looked perfect. We're very, you know, upper middle class. I went to great schools and, you know, everything looked great.

And yet it was, the more I look back, and I think as a child, I didn't understand that it was so different, that it was so wrong. I just thought this is the way people grow up. And I think it took me until I was maybe 40 to really sort out how stressful that situation was and how wrong it was.

Thanks for including the pictures. Oh, thank you. Most memoirs have the pictures in the well, in the middle, and you have to sort out where's that picture from. Yes, yes, yes. My book designer, Mary Sarah Quinn, and I decided we wanted it to be a picture in the beginning of a chapter and a picture at the end of the chapter, and maybe even a recipe from the story.

Jeffrey never told me what to do, which was so the opposite of what my upbringing was, where I was told how to do everything. He just made me feel like he believed that I could do anything and that... We would talk stuff out, and he would say, have you thought about this? And have you thought about that? And we would have a conversation about things.

So he just made me, right from the beginning, he would say to me, do what you love. If you love it, you'll be really good at it. Because he knows I have a lot of enthusiasm and energy for things. He was so ahead of his time, though. I mean, nobody was saying that then. Nobody was saying that in the 70s.

I mean, when I was, you know, when we got married in 1968, he said to me, you need to do something with your life, otherwise you won't be happy. And it's funny, the other day when I made number one on the New York Times bestseller list, he turned to me, he said, you know, you really need to do something with your life. It just reminded me where it started. Wow. It was just great.

After all these years. But he just thought I was very capable and I would be happy if my life was, you know, productive.

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