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 writ.