Care and Feeding
A Memoir
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An Instant New York Times Bestseller!
A candid, funny, and occasionally devastating culinary memoir of a woman making her way through the food world, navigating addiction, a cultural reckoning, and an unexpected tragedy
In this moving, hilarious, and insightful bestselling memoir, Laurie Woolever traces her path from a small-town childhood to working within the high-stakes celebrity chef culture at revered restaurants and food publications, alternately bolstered and overshadowed by two of the most powerful men in the business. But there’s more to the story than the two bold-faced names on her resume: Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain.
Behind the scenes, Laurie’s life is frequently chaotic, a high-functioning addict’s often pleasurable buffet of bad decisions at which she frequently overstays her welcome. Acerbic and wryly self-deprecating, Laurie attempts to carve her own space as a woman in this world that is by turns toxic and intoxicating. Laurie seeks to try it all—from a seedy Atlantic City strip club to the Park Hyatt Tokyo, from a hippie vegetarian co-op to the legendary El Bulli—while balancing her consuming work with her sometimes ambivalent relationship to marriage and motherhood.
As the food world careens toward an overdue reckoning and Laurie’s mentors face their own high-profile descents, she is confronted with the questions of where she belongs in a story of both workplace toxicity and personal recovery, and how to hold on to the parts of her life’s work that she truly values: care and feeding.
This is a story of keeping it together, until several successive implosions—careers, marriages, reputations, lives—show that control is an illusion.
A Behind-the-Scenes Look: Go from a seedy Atlantic City strip club with Mario Batali to the Park Hyatt Tokyo with Anthony Bourdain, witnessing the chaos and charisma of two of the food world’s biggest stars.An Unflinching Addiction Memoir: A raw and darkly funny account of binge drinking, bad decisions, and the slow journey toward sobriety in an industry that runs on excess.Women in the Culinary World: A candid exploration of what it takes to carve out a space as a woman in a kitchen culture that is by turns toxic and intoxicating, balancing ambition with motherhood.A Cultural Reckoning: Witness the food world’s overdue reckoning from the inside, as high-profile mentors face their own descents and hard questions must be answered.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this profane, exhilarating autobiography, Woolever (World Travel)—a former cook and assistant to Anthony Bourdain—takes readers on a ride-along through her turbulent decades in the food industry. After falling in love with cooking during college, Woolever moved to New York City in 1996, stumbling "into the food world at a time when cooking and eating became an increasingly respectable and well-documented form of mass entertainment." She worked odd jobs while taking classes at the French Culinary Institute, and eventually became an assistant to chef Mario Batali, a sometimes "tyrannical, irrational, and mean" boss who Woolever claims sexually harassed her during her first day on the job—though he also helped her sell her first pieces of freelance food writing. Through Battali, Woolever met Bourdain, who eventually hired her to help write a cookbook and serve as an all-purpose assistant. Throughout, Woolever paints a raw portrait of the culinary world's hypermasculine work culture, but she steers clear of playing the victim, frankly acknowledging her own addictions, affairs, and mental health struggles, which nearly derailed her career before 12-step meetings helped her get sober. These rowdy reflections enlighten and entertain.
