Yes. Ina Garten has said she considered divorce during a difficult period in her marriage to Jeffrey, but asked for a separation first. Her account appears in her 2024 memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens; the memoir describes a separation and eventual reconciliation, not a divorce.
Why Garten considered divorce
In her memoir, Garten describes becoming consumed by work after leaving her White House job and starting Barefoot Contessa, then a specialty food store in Westhampton Beach, New York. She felt that traditional expectations of her as a wife no longer fit the life she was building as a businesswoman.
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As she put it in an excerpt reported by ABC News, “I thought about it a lot, and at my lowest point, I wondered if the only answer would be to get a divorce.”
That is Garten’s account of a personal crisis, not evidence that the store alone caused it. A New Yorker profile also describes early relationship roles that later began to chafe.
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She asked for a separation, not a divorce
Garten wrote that she loved Jeffrey and did not want to shock or hurt him, so she chose to suggest a separation first. “I loved Jeffrey and didn’t want to shock — or hurt — him, so I’d start by suggesting we pause for a separation,” she wrote, according to ABC News. She told him she needed to be on her own, and he returned to Washington. Garten called it “the hardest thing I ever did.”
The distinction matters: she said she considered divorce, but the reported step she took was asking for a separation. The memoir account does not say the couple divorced.
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How the separation ended
The Associated Press reported that the separation lasted six months and brought them to the brink of divorce. After time apart, Garten and Jeffrey agreed to meet each other halfway. A 2024 Fresh Air interview with Garten adds her framing: they discussed what had been bothering them, including Jeffrey’s sense of responsibility for her and how that affected travel. She described the change they needed as moving away from a husband-and-wife arrangement toward partnership.
The AP quoted Garten describing the effect of buying the store on their relationship roles: “When I bought Barefoot Contessa, I shattered our traditional roles – took a baseball bat to them and left them in pieces.” Her account presents a period of changing expectations and greater independence, followed by reconciliation.
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