Ina Garten shares she considered divorce from longtime husband Jeffrey: 'I needed that freedom'

"At my lowest point, I wondered if the only answer would be to get a divorce," Garten shares in her new memoir, "Be Ready When the Luck Happens."

Ina Garten gets candid about her longtime marriage to husband Jeffrey in her new memoir, sharing that the two were once on the brink of divorce before she proposed a separation.

In an excerpt from Be Ready When the Luck Happens (out Oct. 1) published in PEOPLE, the television cook and author, 76, writes about how difficult it was to balance marriage with her ambitions. This was during the 1970s, after Garten left her job as a nuclear budget analyst at the White House to run Barefoot Contessa, which was a small specialty food shop in the Hamptons at the time.

Related: Barefoot Contessa star Ina Garten reveals childhood abuse made her 'physically afraid' that father would kill her

"When I bought Barefoot Contessa, I shattered our traditional roles — took a baseball bat to them and left them in pieces," Garten writes. "While I was still cooking, cleaning, shopping, managing at the store, I was doing it as a businesswoman, not a wife. My responsibilities made it impossible for me to even think about anything else. There was no expectation about who got home from work first and what they should do, because I never got home from work!"

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She continues, "When Jeffrey came on weekends he was a distraction. I didn’t pay enough attention to him. I just wanted everyone to leave me alone so I could concentrate on the store. Jeffrey was fully formed and living the life he wanted to live. I wasn’t, and I wouldn’t be able to figure out who I was or what I wanted unless I was on my own. I needed that freedom." Garten says she contemplated a divorce, but instead proposed a separation.

"I thought about it a lot, and at my lowest point, I wondered if the only answer would be to get a divorce," Garten recalls. "I loved Jeffrey and didn’t want to shock — ­or hurt — ­him, so I’d start by suggesting we pause for a separation."

Calling it "the hardest thing I ever did," Garten says, "I told him that I needed to be on my own. I didn’t say whether it was for now... or forever. In true Jeffrey form, he said, 'If you feel like you need to be on your own, you need to do it.' He packed his bag and went home to Washington with no plan to come back. I buried my emotions and threw myself into my work."

When the shop closed for the winter, Garten moved back to Washington, D.C., where she reconnected with Jeffrey. They were in a "a painful limbo," Garten recounts. "I doubted we could make our relationship work, and that we might be heading for divorce. I just couldn’t live with him in a traditional 'man and wife' relationship. Jeffrey hadn’t done anything wrong. He was just doing what every man before him had done. But we were living in a new era, and that behavior wasn’t okay with me anymore. I had changed."

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The two attended therapy together, and, of course, have remained together ever since. Garten wed her husband — often a fixture on her Food Network shows, including Barefoot Contessa — in 1968. She has also credited her partner of over five decades for helping her make the plunge with her career pivot at the age of 30.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.