Transcript: Laurie Woolever
An interview with the American writer and editor
This week on the Lean Out podcast we are shifting our focus from the political to the personal. My guest on the program has written a remarkable memoir about her time in the food world, her story of addiction and recovery — and what she learned from her years collaborating with the late Anthony Bourdain.
Laurie Woolever is an American writer and editor. Her latest book, a New York Times bestseller, is Care and Feeding: A Memoir.
This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.
TH: It’s wonderful to have you on the show. I picked up your book for pleasure reading. But as soon as I got into the story, I knew I wanted to have you on the show. You’re a fantastic writer. There’s also just so much to talk about in the memoir.
LW: It is a dense story, for sure. Lots of elements.
TH: For listeners, the memoir takes a deep dive into the American food world. It tells your story of addiction and recovery. It chronicles the #MeToo moment. It explores marriage and divorce. It of course shares your time working for the late Anthony Bourdain. We will pull these threads. But to start, you’ve written a number of books. What compelled you to write this one, which is so personal?
LW: I have been lucky to collaborate with a number of people over the years. A lot of cookbooks. Then I did a collaboration with the late Anthony Bourdain. You’ll hear me refer to him as Tony throughout because that’s how he referred to himself. We did a book called World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, and it was a follow-up to the cookbook that we wrote together in 2016 called Appetites. So, I got very comfortable with collaboration. I understood how the book world worked. In 2021 or maybe 2022, my desk cleared. I had published World Travel and also a book called Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography. The question was, what do I do next? This memoir had been percolating in my mind for a very long time. I had a lot of stories to tell. I had, I think, some very relatable themes that I wanted to explore on the page.
I thought, “If there’s one thing that I will regret not doing, it’s writing this book. So let me give it a try, see if somebody might be interested in publishing it.” Fortunately, I found a willing publisher in HarperCollins, Ecco, my imprint in the States, with whom Tony worked very closely for a long time. It was a perfect fit.
TH: Let’s dive into the story. You grew up in a small town in upstate New York. You went to Cornell, graduated in 1996, then moved to New York City. You write, “My parents had taught me to keep my head down and do my work, accept what’s offered, show up early, be polite, become indispensable.” Beyond that, you didn’t have much of a plan. Talk to us about the series of events that landed you in the food world.
LW: I graduated college in 1996 and moved to New York right away. I had a job lined up at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. I had studied natural resources in college, and I didn’t really know whether or what I would do with that degree, but this was a good first step. It gave me the courage to move to New York — to have a job, which was an internship really with the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. I quickly realized that that was not where I wanted to be. I wanted to be indoors. I wanted to wear nail polish and have air conditioning and a telephone. I had a couple of false starts, then I ended up getting a job with the family cooking for them privately. I didn’t have any training. I wasn’t even necessarily a very good cook. I had basic skills that college students develop in order to survive.
But this was perfect for this family because they were very health oriented. They wanted extremely simple, fat-free food. This was the mid-1990s, so that was the prevailing diet ethos. I did that for two years and I became a somewhat better cook. It was a limiting job in a lot of ways. It was steamed vegetables and plain whole wheat pasta and broiled chicken breasts. You know, very simple. It gave me a taste of “I really like cooking, but I want to actually learn how to cook for real. I want to be a trained cook.” So, I went to culinary school in New York at a school called the French Culinary Institute, which unfortunately no longer exists. It was absorbed into a different school in New York. Then, again after a few false starts, I got hired to be Mario Batali’s assistant.
He was just on his rise at that time. He had two restaurants in New York. He had published a cookbook already and was just starting to work on a second one. That’s how I fit in. I had enough knowledge of food and writing to assist with that book — and just be whatever he needed from me day to day, whether it was an extra pair of hands in the kitchen, or someone to take phone calls and messages, or do administrative work. I checked coats. I answered phones at the restaurant. I made dinner for his family sometimes when he wasn’t around. I did it all. It was a perfect job for me at that time. I felt incredibly lucky to be at this intersection of restaurants, real estate, business, wine, and media. It was just an extraordinary graduate education in all of these things.
TH: I want to read a paragraph from that time. This is when, as you say, you stepped into the kitchen. You write, “I loved the sense of purpose I felt among like-minded people as we grouped together, split off, regrouped. Standing at my station, breaking animals and vegetables into edible parts and useful scraps, then combining those elements in appealing and lucrative ways, I felt focused, motivated, useful, and alive. There was something almost spiritual about the whole enterprise.” Unpack that for us.
LW: When things are going well in a kitchen or in a dining room, in a restaurant in general, I find — and I don’t think I’m alone in this — that there is such a satisfaction. Such a pleasure in being part of this human machine. Against all odds, and against the constant threat of entropy and chaos, you are actually working together to create something larger than yourself.
At 24, 25 years old, I don’t know that I really saw it. I think some of this is more hindsight for me. But I knew that I felt a certain way. I knew that there was a high and a rush and a satisfaction that was different from cooking in my own kitchen for myself and a few friends, or cooking for my former employers. There was this beauty and excitement and satisfaction there, that I think is one of the things that really hooks people in this career.
There are a lot of negatives that you have heard plenty about, in terms of low pay, long hours, sometimes emotional and physical abuse — all of the things that are pretty well documented — but there is this beauty. Of course, Tony Bourdain wrote about this very eloquently and compellingly in his book Kitchen Confidential. Which hadn’t come out yet. By the time I started working for Mario, I think it was probably a year out from publication. When it did come out, it was incredibly validating for many people. I think it continues to be validating for people in the industry, or people considering getting into the industry.
TH: Batali had his challenges. I’m sure listeners will have read some of the news stories about this. But what I want to focus on right now is the hedonism. I found that fascinating. On an early work trip to Atlantic City, you tried to order a salad. You write that he said, “No effing way are you getting just a spinach salad. If you’re going to go out with me, you will order a cocktail, an appetizer, a mid-course pasta, an entree, a dessert, a cheese course, and an amaro or a grappa, and we will drink a shit-ton of expensive wine.” You had already felt the seductive pull of alcohol and drugs at this point. Talk to me about the kind of environment this created, this hedonism, and what some of the consequences were for you personally.
LW: At first, it was all upside. It was very exciting to be told that this is our lives, this is what we do, this is part of our work — to eat and drink and taste and experience everything. I think that was hardwired in me to want to do all that, and to have a professional justification for it. It was like, “Great. Okay, I’m in.” I love to eat and drink and push it to the absolute limit. So, it was really fun. It gave me licence to run up an enormous amount of credit card debt in the service of, “Well, I’m learning. I’m out here experiencing, seeing what the competition is doing.” There are a million justifications for all of this.
When you’re in your 20s, or at least when I was in my 20s, for a time, I could sustain it. Because you bounce back much quicker. As the years went on, it takes its toll. I’m not saying anything that’s not very well documented. As you get older, maybe you need more and bigger and greater and shinier experiences to keep returning to that sense of satisfaction and chasing the new thrill. It rarely ends well for people if you don’t have the ability to self-regulate and to turn it off. It took me a very long time to realize that I was one of those people who didn’t have that. Didn’t have the capacity to say, “I’ve had three drinks, I think that’s enough for tonight.” Once my engine was turned on, it was just, “Drive the car of yourself into the wall” — and learn almost nothing from probably hundreds of hangovers and hundreds of late mornings at work or feeling sick all day. I didn’t learn until I was ready to learn that that was not a sustainable way of life for me.
I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I can’t. There’s no point in trying to re-litigate the past. This is how I chose to live my life for a very long time. But it has its consequences. I know I used alcohol as a way to allow myself to behave in ways that maybe I wanted to internally, maybe I knew it was wrong — but, “Well, I was drunk.” It was an easy excuse to pull out the next morning when you take stock of the wreckage of what you’ve done. Again, I’m not alone in that. I don’t think it’s talking out of turn to say that Mario Batali is also someone who drank to excess. You know, [he] openly, proudly, athletically drank a lot. I think that some of the problems in his behaviour, and the consequences that he faced for them, I think that if he had not been using alcohol in that way that things might have gone differently for him.
TH: Let’s just spend a moment on #MeToo, because you really did have a front row seat for this. Of course, Batali has had allegations of alleged misconduct. But Anthony Bourdain’s girlfriend was one of the women who accused Harvey Weinstein. I wondered if we could take a step back with #MeToo in general. Weinstein is a classic case of this being really an important movement, but there were overreach cases too. I’m thinking of Aziz Ansari. How do you sort through that time? What do you think about it now, with the benefit of retrospect?
