47 pages • 1 hour read
Ina GartenBe Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Julia Child
Julia Child (1912-2004) was an iconic American chef, author, and television personality best known for her groundbreaking two-volume cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961). Along with her cookbooks, her Emmy-winning television series The French Chef introduced American audiences to French cooking techniques and classic French dishes. Child appears as a recurring motif throughout the memoir, acting as a manifestation of Garten’s goals for and impact on the American food industry. Although Garten initially idolizes Child, she later develops a cooking philosophy that prizes simplicity, starkly contrasting with the more formal, elaborate food that made Child famous.
After Garten returns from her transformative trip to France, she relies heavily on Julia Child as she attempts to teach herself to cook. She imagines them as a pair: “Ina and Julia—me and my copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking” (100) pushing against the world of processed American food. She describes her experience with these recipes as “an adventure—a chance to meet new ingredients, learn a technique, or solve a problem” (100). These passages establish Child as an essential influence for Garten and suggest a continuity between the two women. As she grows as a chef, however, she comes to view Child’s recipes as overly complicated, a term she uses multiple times (100, 108, 145, 232). In cooking classes, she discovers that “food wasn’t about following a classic Julia Child recipe” (145), but about expressing creativity, and that “the only limit to what you could cook was your imagination” (145). Even as she rejects Child’s complicated methodologies, she still uses her recipes as an inspiration, asking “how could I simplify them so that they would still have the same deep, satisfying flavors?” (232). These repeated comparisons to Julia Child reflect Garten’s continued efforts to shape the American food industry in the same way as her predecessor.
Paris
The city of Paris, France appears throughout Be Ready When the Luck Happens as a symbol of Garten’s goals for herself. From her first introduction to the city as a young girl, the idea of Paris is aspirational for Garten. Raised in an emotionally and physically abusive home, Garten has few sources of joy as a child. A rare exception is the “Paris dress […] flouncy little off-the-shoulder number” (13) that her grandparents bring back for her from Paris. The Paris dress is nothing like the “usual practical, inexpensive clothing” (13) Garten’s mother usually purchases, and Garten writes that she “loved the way it made me look and feel—pretty and ready for a party” (13). These passages suggest that the Paris dress—and by extension, Paris itself—is an aspirational symbol for Garten, who sees it as an escape from the reality of her emotionally unfulfilling and sometimes traumatic life at home.
Paris also serves as an aspirational symbol in Garten’s relationship with Jeffrey. Early in their relationship, he writes a letter imagining a trip they’re planning to take to Paris: “I’d like to get up at 4 a.m. and walk the streets […] while the sun comes up […] around the market […] along the Seine. That’s us” (51). Garten’s letter acknowledges that this simple itinerary reflects their small budget, but predicts that, on their next trip, “maybe we’ll have some money, and then we’ll want to do only the things we did when we didn’t have any” (51). Jeffrey’s letter depicts Paris as a place where they are free to explore and be together, regardless of their situation in life. Garten works hard to make this dream a reality, spending years renovating an apartment in Paris where they “try not to have a plan at all” (268). Garten concludes that “the best day of our lives was the day that Jeffrey came home to our new Paris apartment” (245), suggesting that the apartment represents the fulfilment of their goals as a couple.
Real Estate and Renovations
Throughout the memoir, Garten’s real estate and renovation projects appear as a symbol of her creativity. Although the primary focus of the novel is her career as a chef and food television star, the inclusion of repeated anecdotes about her construction projects reflects the wide variety of creative projects she has undertaken. The most significant projects described in the book are the renovation of her Paris apartment and the construction of her film studio/work space in East Hampton. Although Garten acknowledges that overseeing a construction project in a foreign country is “not crazy—it’s certifiably insane” (244), the project represents a lifelong dream for her and Jeffrey, and she pursues the project for many years. Later, the construction of her East Hampton studio fulfills a similar creative need, and prompts more creativity. As Garten explains, “good architecture makes me want to do a better job, to live up to the promise of the space” (253). Garten suggests that the creative challenge of real estate and renovations helps her to flex other creative muscles.
