Ina Garten has written a new memoir, but it’s the words her husband Jeffrey wrote that really had an impact on her.
The “Barefoot Contessa” and author of 13 cookbooks will release a memoir, “Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” on Oct. 1, in which she tells her story, including her romance with husband Jeffrey, whom she married in 1968.
She says she has kept all of his love letters from years gone by.
“He wrote to me every day when he was in college and then when he was in the military,” she said April 11 on TODAY. “And I put them all in a box. And I had that as a record. It was really quite extraordinary.”
Her hubby got a look at the book and was riveted by what his wife had to say.
“He read it, the last form before it went to the publisher,” the “Be My Guest” host said.
“And he sat down at 1:30 in the afternoon, thinking, ‘I’ll read for a few hours.’ He didn’t get up until he finished it at 7:30 that night. So lovely. I was bringing him snacks so he didn’t starve to death.”
After Carson Daly jokingly asked if he wrote another love letter and whether the book managed to “reinspire him,” Garten said writing the memoir took her back to times she hadn’t thought about it quite some time.
“Well, there were things that I thought never happened, but they were in the letters,” she said. “And it made us realize that, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s right. That did happen.’”
Writing seems to in Jeffrey Garten’s blood. Ina Garten has said he sends her racy text messages, though they don’t always go to the intended recipient.
“He does, and sometimes they go astray,” she said on “The Drew Barrymore Show” in 2022. “He sends them to the wrong person.”
“My dear friend, who’s also my publicist, he sent a text to her, and he meant it for me, and he said, ‘You’re going to be delicious tonight,’ and it went to her,” she added.
“She was like, ‘Whoa.’ She sent back, ‘I don’t think this was meant for me.’”
It’s all adorable and fateful, considering Garten said their relationship got off on the wrong track. They met in 1963 at Dartmouth College, and she called their first date “a disaster” after she suggested they go to a bar, even though she was underage and didn’t have any ID to get in.
“I had no idea that I needed a fake ID to get into a bar when I was 16,” she said on “The Drew Barrymore Show” in 2022.
“Many years later I said to him, ‘What did you think, like, why did you want to take me out again?’ He said, ‘I thought you needed taking care of.’”