Ina Garten has revealed she was “physically afraid” of her dad and spent much of her childhood in her bedroom with the door closed for “protection.”
The Barefoot Contessa star said her life was “pretty unhappy” as she was growing up in Connecticut in the 1950s and that her surgeon father Charles Rosenberg was “difficult” with both her and her brother.
“To some extent I think I was physically afraid of my dad, like I literally remember thinking he would kill me if I did something, so I was physically afraid of him,” she told People in a video interview.
“I think if there is a threat of violence you are always afraid, even when it’s not happening. So, I basically spent my entire childhood in my bedroom with the door closed and I think it was just protection, it was just to keep myself safe.”
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“And so I had a very lonely childhood,” she added.
Garten’s dad died in 2004 but she revealed that she had “made peace” with him by that point because “in his own way, he apologized.”
Newsweek has contacted a representative for Garten for comment.
The TV star and writer—who has opened up about her life growing up in her new memoir, Be Ready When The Luck Happens—has also shared how she had a difficult relationship with her mother, Florence. She has previously told how Florence, who died in 2006, didn’t like her daughter cooking with her, and would ask her to go and study while she cooked meals.
“When I was growing up I wasn’t allowed to cook,” Garten said in an episode of the Cooking Up A Storm podcast in 2021. “I wasn’t allowed in the kitchen. I don’t know, I think my mother just wanted me in my room and she wanted the kitchen to herself.
“She said, ‘It’s your job to study, it’s my job to cook, just get out of the kitchen.’ So I kind of always wanted to do it.”
The star tied the knot with her husband Jeffrey in 1968, when she was 20 years old, and said it was then that she realized that she was drawn to all things culinary. She taught herself how to whip up various dishes by reading a book by the chef Julia Child, before starting to hanker after a career in cooking.
“At some point, I thought, ‘I want to do this for my work and not just for fun,'” she explained.
