Celebrity cook Ina Garten has opened up about abuse she suffered in childhood. In her memoir Be Ready When the Luck Happens, which comes out on Oct. 1, the 76-year-old describes growing up in Connecticut with a controlling mother and a father who would scream and hit her and her brother Ken during what she describes as "temper tantrums." "I remember being terrified of my father," she tells the New Yorker. Her father, surgeon Charles Rosenberg "would just have a rage, where he would drag me around the house by my hair," she says. "He never sexually abused me, but he had this love-hate relationship with me. I think he loved me, but he wanted me to be who he wanted me to be, without any consciousness of who I am."
"I literally remember thinking he would kill me if I did something. I was physically afraid of him," the Barefoot Contessa star tells People. "If there's a threat of violence, you're always afraid, even when it's not happening. So I basically spent my entire childhood in my bedroom with a door closed." She says her mother, Florence Rosenberg, "just was unsupportive." Garten tells the New Yorker that her mother, who trained as a dietician, was "obsessed with what she ate" and chose not to serve carbohydrates or dessert. "It was all about nutrition rather than pleasure," Garten says. "My mother didn't understand pleasure."
Garten tells People that she reconciled with her father later in life, but not with her mother. "He, in his own way, apologized and my mom never acknowledged it," she says. In the memoir, Garten says her life changed when she was 16 years old and she met Jeffrey Garten. She married him four years later, in 1968, despite her mother objecting that she was too young. "It was the first time in my life when I just said to her, 'I know you don't think this is a good idea," she tells People. "And for the first time, I'm really sorry to tell you this, but I don't care. I'm doing this." (More memoir stories.)
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