Ina Garten is opening up about her childhood.
The 76-year-old celebrity cook opened up about suffering physical and emotional abuse from her late parents, Charles and Florence Rosenberg, for the first time in her memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens, out on October 1.
In a conversation with People, she spoke about being afraid of her father, a surgeon, who would hit her and pull her hair if she did something he disapproved of.
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“I was terrified. I was physically afraid of my dad. I literally remember thinking he would kill me if I did something. I was physically afraid of him. And my mother just was unsupportive,” she said, adding that her brother Ken was also a victim of their father’s anger.
“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. I think it was just protection. It was just to keep myself safe.”
She also called her mother controlling, and said that while her bedroom was her “safe haven,” it was decorated in peach and white even though she wanted it purple, because her mother told her it would “turn out badly.”
“It was something she said to me a lot,” she adds.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if she was diagnosed with Asperger’s [Syndrome]. She really didn’t know how to have a relationship, which is why I think, as I’ve gotten older, having relationships is so important to me.”
“Everything changed when I met Jeffrey,” she went on to say of meeting her husband.
After four years of dating, the two married in 1968.
“[My mother] thought I was too young to get married, but 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. And for the first time, I’m really sorry to tell you this, but I don’t care. I’m doing this.’”
Ina says she made peace with her father later in life, but never reconciled with her mother.
“He, in his own way, apologized and my mom never acknowledged it. I think I overcame my childhood just by sheer determination. I just wasn’t about to spend my life like that. And I think, a lot of times, people make a decision to live their lives differently and they end up sliding back into what they feel is familiar and I was determined not to do that. And then I met Jeffrey and he just showed me a totally different way to live.”
