Ina Garten and the fantasy of the ‘Friendsgiving’ life

What is it about Ina Garten? The “Barefoot Contessa” chef and entrepreneur inspires a kind of devotion that few celebrities achieve. It’s not just that people love her recipes, her shows and her products. It’s that they want to be her.
“I would LOVE to have her life,” writes one fan on the QVC website. “She even worked in the Carter White House. She is a smart businesswoman, a great cook and a lifestyle maven.” Perhaps it’s because Garten’s show invites people into her home, where they can see her Hamptons casual-chic lifestyle, her inviting gardens and, perhaps most importantly, her relationship with her husband, Jeffrey. “I think they are the cutest couple,” writes a fan. “I think he is so adorable. They seem to really light up around each other.”
But Garten’s new memoir, “Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” describes an unhappy childhood, including parents who were emotionally absent and a father who was at times physically abusive. She had friends, though, and was academically very successful. She met her husband when she was still in high school and he was in college. And he turned out to be her ticket out of her parents’ home. It was not just that she married young; it was also that she was able to build her own life away from the people who made her unhappy.
There were struggles, of course. Having joined ROTC during college, Jeffrey spent the first few years of their marriage in the Army, including time spent overseas. The newlyweds were away from each other for months at a time. They didn’t have a lot of money. Garten couldn’t figure out what she really wanted to do.
Certainly, it helped that Garten had a positive attitude about life, a kindness and honesty when dealing with others, and a husband who accommodated her search for a passion, from flipping houses to going to business school to buying a small grocery store in the Hamptons when they lived in Washington DC.
And when something goes wrong, she learned that it was not the end of the world. “You never know your good breaks from your bad,” she likes to quote her husband as saying. But it would be hard to pinpoint any really bad breaks for Garten, at least once she left home.
Maybe she is hiding real problems or just putting a positive spin on issues that were much more serious, but this is a memoir so one might expect some bitter with the sweet.
There is one point early on where Ina and Jeffrey considered splitting up. They were spending a lot of time on different continents — he held high-powered jobs in finance and government while she was getting her business off the ground in New York. She worried that she might be getting used to life without her husband. The matter is resolved, however, with a little therapy and some honest conversation about what they each want out of life.
I’m sure much more was involved, but the truth is that things have been easier for Ina and Jeffrey than for most of their fans. For one thing, they decided early on not to have any children. Ina didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of her parents, she tells her readers. And so the two of them were left to pursue their own ambitions, while trying to be in the same place more often than not.
In fact, the things that most married couples fight over, according to therapists, are how they spend their time, how they spend their money and how they raise their children. When two people with ambition and resources but no children have marital differences they can be resolved pretty easily. No one is forced to compromise, and their path as a couple is greased by their professional success.
At one point, the memoir tells us, when Jeffrey takes a job in Asia, he negotiates with his employer for the company to fund first-class airline tickets for them to go back and forth a couple of times a month. Of course, it helps that they both seem to be pretty accommodating people with a willingness to compromise.
Fans of the couple admire the fact that their lives seem smooth, not messy. That is not just the gloss of television. That is also the fact of not having children — and perhaps not having much to do with Ina’s parents, now deceased, either.
This resonates among some young adults who have decided that friends are a “chosen” family who can replace actual family. As far back as the early 2000s, the term “Friendsgiving” was invented to describe celebrating the holiday with the people you actually liked instead of having to deal with your challenging (and possibly bigoted) relatives. Ina and Jeffrey seem to be having Friendsgiving every week both in their real life — where they love throwing dinner parties for their friends — and on television, too.
I have a couple of her cookbooks and she seems like a lovely person, but it all seems a little hedonistic — even accounting for all the hard work she does. Life with family is messier, more frustrating and exhausting. I might like to be Ina for a weekend here and there, but that’s about it.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Deseret News contributor and the author of “No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives,” among other books.