Care and Feeding
A Memoir
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4.5 • 65 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An Instant New York Times Bestseller!
A candid, funny, and occasionally devastating 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 memoir, Laurie Woolever traces her path from a small-town childhood to working 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, an 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 and how to hold on to the parts of her life’s work that she truly values: care and feeding.
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.
Customer Reviews
Engrossing
Fantastic memoir
I’m so sorry…
I think that the author is a very talented writer, but I have to admit that the best parts of the book were reading about Mario Battali and Tony Bourdain. To read what these chefs were like “behind the scenes.” Frankly, I was appalled at the amount of alcohol and drugs she consumed every single day of her adult life, and there were literally no consequences to her work life, her marriage, or her role as a mother. How did people not see this? How was this not a big deal? I have to say, after reflecting on this book, it was very disappointing.