Laurie Woolever Is Ready to Tell Her Story

After years of assisting Mario Batali and then Anthony Bourdain, Woolever has written a memoir that’s tricky to classify and even harder to put down

Laurie Woolever’s memoir Care and Feeding is many things: a workplace memoir, an addiction memoir, a chronicle of being young and a little bit lost in New York City, an account of working in close proximity to fame. Woolever is a longtime journalist and cookbook author who also worked as an assistant to Mario Batali and then Anthony Bourdain. While those two men are part of Woolever’s story, her book is, above all, a very funny and self-aware odyssey through the highs and lows of trying to find one’s place in a frequently mystifying, occasionally hostile world. Prior to writing Care and Feeding, Woolever authored Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography and co-wrote World Travel: An Irreverent Guide and Appetites: A Cookbook with Bourdain. We spoke with her about the process of turning memories into a book, working in the shadows of important men, and why this is not a culinary memoir. [This story mentions incidents of sexual harassment.]

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How did you decide that you wanted to write a memoir?

As I write about in the book, I’ve always wanted to be a writer. So in some ways, this is a project that I’ve kind of been writing in my head for a long time. I’m not sure that I always thought it would be a memoir, but I knew that I wanted to write about my experiences in New York, in kitchens, with high-profile people, traveling, all of the experiences that I’ve had since I graduated college. And there was always a good reason to not do it: the jobs that I had, or the other obligations on my time, or the people who I didn’t want to read it, like my mother, who’s no longer around — I’m not sure if I would have done it if she were still around. But I sort of cleared the decks at the end of 2021 with the oral biography and World Travel. I felt like I’d got some momentum as an author and thought, why don’t I give it a try?

I wasn’t sure if I should do a memoir or maybe some autofiction or just a straight novel or a series of essays. And then for various reasons, memoir seemed to be the one that made the most sense and fit with the material and the time period that I wanted to write about. I’ve always been writing down my own story, but it wasn’t like I was always thinking someday I’ll write a memoir, because it feels, honestly, a little obnoxious to live that way.

I was going to ask you about that because a lot of people want to write a memoir, and there have been a lot of culinary memoirs as well. I don’t know if you think of this as a culinary memoir, but I was wondering what your perception of memoirs was before you began writing, and if there was anything you wanted to avoid.

A good memoir is really compelling to me. Obviously there are some amazing culinary memoirs — Kitchen Confidential; and Blood Bones & Butter; and Black, White, and the Grey. I didn’t really want to write a culinary memoir; I wasn’t looking to do Garlic and Sapphires for my generation. Obviously food has been a big part of my career and my life. For me to have turned my back and say, “I’m not going to write about food at all,” would be sort of foolish from a marketing and business perspective, but also not true to my history. But that being said, I didn’t want to just pack it full of, I ate this and I ate that and I cooked this. I think sometimes there are ways that you can kind of overdo it and really torture a metaphor and try too hard to stitch together qualities of food or cooking and whatever’s going on in the narrative. And I wanted to avoid that. So there’s as much food in it as made sense for my story and as my editor requested. But I’m not M.F.K. Fisher.

You write quite a bit about drinking and addiction; I don’t know if it was your intent or not, but as a reader I really got a sense of how exhausting it was to go through. Obviously you’ve been sober for several years, but what was it like to put yourself back there, where you were reliving it to a certain extent?

It was strange and nice to be at a remove from it. It’s not something that I had a perspective on when I was in it. So, it was a little sad to go back and realize how much I was on a path of self-destruction. I was very much in denial about my behavior and where it was leading me. So, it was painful in some ways, just to look at all of the time I wasted and the damage that I did to myself and the people around me. But also, it was kind of reassuring; it reinforced for me that the choice that I made to stop drinking was the right choice. So it also feels like, wow, I can see now with some perspective that I’ve actually grown up and gotten healthier and all of the things you hope happen once you give up bad habits.

Did writing Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography help you prepare for the process of writing about yourself?

Yeah, for sure. I really developed my skills as an interviewer, as a listener. I think before I started the oral biography project I really believed that I knew everything about Tony, which was silly in retrospect. But I was just coming out of the fog of grief and coming out of this job working so closely with him. So I just was like, I know everything that’s going on, and of course that’s not true. And in doing all of those interviews, I learned something new from every single person that I talked to, which made me realize you can never fully know a person, probably yourself included. So then it was also like, I may not remember something correctly, somebody else might not remember something correctly. That sort of let me approach this project with a little more willingness to be wrong, or be proved wrong, or discover new things. So, it was definitely a useful exercise to have done the biography before the memoir.

One thing I appreciated in your book was how vivid and complicated and ultimately quite damning a picture you paint of Mario [Batali]. What was it like to put yourself back there with him? I’m curious if it made you look differently at how you remembered your experience of him and his behavior.

I want to be thoughtful and careful when I answer this. I mean, you’re at Eater, and Eater was one of the publications that did a story about Mario in 2017 that kind of changed everything. As I write in the book, I was talking to reporters for those stories, which was a very terrifying thing that I had a lot of mixed feelings about. I started writing the book in earnest in 2022, so I had already kind of gone back into that vault not too long ago and really tried to examine what it was like and what my part in it was, and what impact it had on me, if any. I had already given a lot of thought to what my working conditions were like, and how significant it was that I got my ass grabbed at work, and that I was made to sort of straddle him on an airplane.

So, I already felt pretty resolved about my feelings. But then to go back and really write about it and, as one has to do in a memoir, to center myself in it, I uncovered maybe some deeper feelings or just greater understanding of all the forces at play. What I ultimately came to was that — and I’m not breaking news here by any means — there was an enormous power imbalance and that’s always what it is in these scenarios of workplace sexual harassment. I think I didn’t truly internalize and understand that until I started writing about it in this way.

[When Mario was] outed as somebody who sexually harassed people, there was a lot of extremely black and white, you’re-with-us-or-against-us kind of discourse. Which is understandable; I think there was a lot of rage and a lot of disappointment. Again, I’m not breaking news here, but some of this stuff isn’t so black and white. And especially if you’ve benefited and chosen to work with people who are ultimately shown to be not great people, it can just feel complicated. I guess I would imagine it’s akin to having a family member who you find out is doing bad stuff — it’s complicated. So, I wanted to be careful to give some of that a little bit of oxygen without excusing any of Mario’s behavior or in any way discounting the experiences of people who were hurt by him. [I wanted] just to say, here’s why it’s complicated, and here’s a theory or a little bit of context to understand why people might not have complained or spoken up loudly enough or protected themselves or each other in that time period. Some of this came out in 2017, but it felt very precarious to say anything except, “This man is the devil and must disappear off the face of the earth.”

So I wanted to be honest that there were times when I had a lot of fun working for Mario and there were a lot of career benefits to me. He introduced me to Tony Bourdain. He gave me my first opportunity to work on a cookbook. Again, that doesn’t make it okay for him to hurt people, but this is why it felt complicated for me.

Relatedly, one thing you write about is working a lot, as you say, in the shadow of important men. You spent a long part of your career working for Batali and then Bourdain and you’re very honest in the book about how you wouldn’t have had certain opportunities without them. But this memoir is entirely your own, so, I wonder what it was like to put yourself in the spotlight?

I only now feel like I have a spotlight on me because [writing] is a largely solitary process. I mean, yeah, it’s a little scary. I feel pretty confident in saying that there’s a contingent of people that are going to be like, “Who the fuck is she and why should I give a shit about her? She was just the assistant.” And that’s kind of okay, I don’t intend to engage with that. Yeah, I’m not a celebrity. I don’t have a television show and I’m not a superstar. So, there’s that fear of being sort of questioned like, “Who do you think you are to write a memoir?” But I think that in my story there’s enough to grab on to that I think people can relate to, whether it’s addiction, sexual politics at work, being ambivalent about marriage or motherhood, or body anxiety stuff. I think I’ve had pretty common American-white-middle-class-lady experiences that are relatable to all kinds of people. So, yeah, it feels like I’m taking a risk, and there are things in the book, behaviors and decisions that I made, that I’m not proud of. There’s some concern that I’m going to be judged, but then it’s like, I’m 50 years old and my mom’s not around to judge me anymore. And, I’m going to probably curate the extent to parts of the book my dad reads. So, if not now, when?

Bourdain is obviously a big part of the book, and I feel like so many people think they own him. So many people who never knew him, I should say. But they are very attached to their memories of him, and so when it came to writing about him, how did you want to approach that?

I mean, I would push back on the idea that he’s a big part of the book. I know that is the angle [of the book] that gets the most attention — the tagline says, “New York Times bestselling author of Bourdain,” and that was a deliberate choice by the marketing people to put his name on the cover. Obviously there’s a lot of interest there, but I really tried to be careful. I didn’t want to write a book about Tony. I’ve already done that. But it would be really ridiculous for me to write a workplace memoir and not talk about him. I think I did the best I could to be honest and also to make it clear that we had a great working relationship. I loved him and respected him. He was a very, very private person and there were long periods of time where I wouldn’t see him in person. I’m sure that nobody thinks about this stuff even a fraction as much as I do, but sometimes — especially shortly after his death, but even now — people will say in an interview, “You were closer to him than anyone.” Just because I was his assistant. I mean, I knew where he was all the time and what was going on in his business life, but there were things I didn’t know about. So, I wanted to be really, really honest about the ways in which he was supportive to me, the ways in which it was so great to work for him, the things that I learned from him, the examples that he set, and my own feelings of sort of wanting to be like him in some ways. I didn’t want to break any news about him. There’s a lot of his story that has come out since he died, and I didn’t want to be a part of that.

Of course, I included the text message that we had shortly before he died. It’s pretty short and really didn’t say much, but that’s gotten a lot of [press] attention because I think it just speaks to the love that people have for him, and the hold he has on people’s imaginations. It’s almost seven years that he’s been gone, and there’s just such a hunger. I think when you leave the world the way he did, there’s so many unanswered questions, and so any little piece of information that people can find to try and make sense of the decision that he made to end his life, I totally understand that. But my goal was definitely not to blow open the mystery of Tony Bourdain.

Something you mention in the book is that when Anthony was encouraging you to come forward about Mario, it briefly crossed your mind “that he was using the Mario situation, and me, to perform his allyship and secure a place in Asia’s [Argento, Bourdain’s then-girlfriend] increasingly fickle heart.” Was it hard to be honest about that kind of stuff?

Yes and no. I mean, it’s the truth. It’s a thought that I had. I guess the question is, do you feel like you need to be loyal and protect the deified version — I guess that’s part of the needle that I’m threading. I love that people care so much about him and still watch the shows and talk about him, and all the evident love for him in the world is really comforting and wonderful and I hope that continues forever. I do not wish in any way to erode that. But at what point do you get to be honest about your own experience? I think that he was a human being, like we all are. He was very quick to say, “I’m not perfect. I don’t know everything. I make mistakes.” My observation is that he rejected this sort of canonization of him as a person. I think it was embarrassing to him. So, I think I was gentle but honest. My overwhelming sense, or my experience with him, was quite positive. But this was a sensitive time around the #MeToo stuff, and if I wasn’t working for Tony, I’m quite sure I never would have spoken to anyone because that felt complicated.

One other thing that really came through to me in your book is just how surreal working around fame and power can be. I was struck by the scene where you’re having an abortion and the doctor wants to talk to you about Anthony; I almost screamed reading it. I’m curious what your perception of fame was before you started working for famous people, and how that changed for you?

I’m 50, so I was a kid in the ’80s. The song and the show Fame sort of loomed large in the culture. I was kind of a show-offy little kid and wanted to be famous, for the sake of fame. And maybe that’s a very common thing. At some point I kind of came to my senses, but I was from a young age kind of captivated by the idea of fame, and maybe that sort of subsided a bit when I got to be, like, a teenage hippie. Then once I got to New York, it was like, “Here’s a place where there’s all kinds of wealth and fame and power and opportunity and if I can get up close to it, that’s pretty interesting to me.”

Famous people are in some ways just like us. And then in some ways they’re probably not. I think there is kind of a ruthlessness that you have to have to get up to a certain level in any field where there’s a measure of fame. I’m not sure that that’s something I knew at the time. I mean, that’s something that I feel like I’ve heard more recently and it makes sense to me now. Anyone who’s so good at what they do has had to be a little bit of a sociopathic monster, and disregard the needs and feelings of others in order to get to the top.

So, yeah, I guess I would say I’m a little disillusioned by fame because I see that it’s temporary. I mean, how many people have really sustained a level of fame for a very long time versus how many have had flashes of it and then tried to chase that high for the rest of their lives? I do not desire to be famous. I do desire for my book to do incredibly well. I do desire to feel financially secure in the way that fame sometimes lends itself to, but I saw with Tony that privacy became a very rare commodity for him and that seemed terrible to me. I really value just being an anonymous person in the world and I think that’s something that I would hate to give up. I don’t think I’m in any danger of it, but yeah, from what I’ve seen and the sort of relative levels of happiness of the people that I’ve known who are famous, I think it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.