Was Ina Garten lucky, or did she make her own luck?
Garten concludes her memoir, “Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” with an interaction with Oprah Winfrey centering around that very question.
The memoir traces how she blossomed into the beloved pop culture entity the Barefoot Contessa, known for her open-armed hospitality — despite a frigid, fear-filled childhood.
The book ends with Garten standing on a stage, accepting the Matrix Award for Women in Media in 2010, arguably an apex point in her career.
In her memoir, Garten summarizes the speech she gave at the New York event.
“I spoke about how lucky I was at each phase of my career because it seemed whatever I was most interested in doing was exactly what the world wanted at the time,” she writes. “I was lucky that I was interested in food and cook books at a time when the world was interested in food and cookbooks. I was lucky that Food Network was looking for home cooks when they found me, and lucky that they refused to take no for an answer. Lucky.”
Then, she shares in the memoir that she took her seat on the stage, “right next to Oprah.” What happened next struck her — literally.
“Immediately, she turned and smacked me on the arm, saying, ‘You weren’t lucky. You make your own luck,’” Garten recalls Winfrey saying.
The moment surprised Garten. “Did Oprah just smack me in front of a thousand people?” she remembers thinking.
“‘Actually, I have been lucky,’ I started to say,” she writes. “And then she smacked me again.”
While introducing the next guest, Lesley Stahl riffed off the interaction between Garten and Winfrey and asked, “‘Why do successful women always say they’re lucky, and successful men say they got there by the force of their talent?”
Garten remembers thinking, “Wait? Did Lesley Stahl just smack me, too?”
Weeks later, during a dinner with director Rob Marshall, Garten heard about the time Liza Minelli told 23-year-old Marshall to “Be ready when the luck happens.”
Garten came out of those moments with a philosophy on life and the title of her memoir.
The author concludes that her story is about “hard work and luck” and says she never has a “five-year plan.”
Instead, she says she concentrates “on what’s in front of me and work hard because I love what I do, and I have fun doing it.”
“And then I leave the door open, so I’ll be ready when the luck happens,” she concludes, ending the memoir.
In a Dec. 24 episode of the “Oprah” podcast, Winfrey and Garten discussed their interaction. Winfrey was struck by the title of the memoir, remembering their conversation.
“I did remember having a discussion but I didn’t remember slapping you,” Winfrey said with a smile.
“Maybe it was a love tap,” Garten said. “You were like, ‘Woah, you make your own luck.’ And I was like, ‘No, I’ve just been really lucky.”
Winfrey said, “In my mind, you were already an iconic figure and a powerful woman. In your acceptance speech, you mentioned luck and luck and luck. I come from the believe that luck is preparation meeting the moment of opportunity.”
Speaking to TODAY’s Hoda Kotb, Garten said it took “enormous determination” to change her life.
“I’ve had this incredible experience where I came from one place and I ended up somewhere else,” she tells Hoda. “It’s turned out so much better than I could have possibly imagined.”
With the memoir, she wanted to share more than her stories of cozy hospitality.
“I wanted to share that and see if people connected with it, and could use what I’ve learned along the way in their own lives,” she says.
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
