Ina Garten got candid about her difficult past and “very lonely childhood.”
In an interview, the Barefoot Contessa star recalled growing up in Connecticut with her brother Ken and being afraid of her father, a surgeon who, she said, would hit her and pull her hair if she disappointed him.
“I was terrified,” the 76-year-old Food Network personality told PEOPLE. “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 was just unsupportive.”
Garten continued, “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 the door closed.”
“I think it was just protection. It was just to keep myself safe.”
Garten described her mother as controlling and speculated that she might have had Asperger’s Syndrome because “she really didn’t know how to have a relationship.” The lack of connection between the two led the Daytime Emmy-winning celebrity cook to focus on maintaining strong bonds in her own life.
“Everything changed when I met Jeffrey,” she said of her husband, whom she first met when she was 16 years old.
“I think I overcame my childhood just by sheer determination,” Garten reflected. “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. I was determined not to do that. And then I met Jeffrey, and he just showed me a totally different way to live.”
After four years of dating, the two married in 1968. “[My mother] thought I was too young to get married,” Garten said, “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.'”
Garten also opened up about suffering physical and emotional abuse from her late parents, Charles and Florence Rosenberg, in her memoir Be Ready When the Luck Happens, out on October 1.