Care & Feeding
In her new memoir, Laurie Woolever puts her own pain on the page, amidst 20 years of Batali and Bourdain.
I met Laurie Woolever back in 2000 when she was Mario Batali’s assistant, a role she played from 1999 to 2002. We emailed mostly and she helped get my questions in front of him for stories I was writing, handling all those press queries and organizing RSVPs for various opening parties. It’s a role she white-knuckled, handling his fits of rage, sideways glances and ass grabs, while working the line and the office, before joining the editorial staff at magazines like Wine Spectator and Art Culinaire and eventually becoming Anthony Bourdain’s assistant, working closely on his books and television shows, from 2009 until his death in 2018.
The thing that is revealed in her excellent new memoir, “Care and Feeding,” which Ecco published yesterday, is not just the drug and alcohol addiction that rattled her life, a frenzy of ups and downs spent shielding and wrangling the most celebrated of chefs, while figuring out how to be a woman, wife, and mother in a world of high testosterone male dominance.
What is revealed on the pages of this feverish book, is a beautiful writer; a woman who can finally put her own life down in her own words, not ghost writing anymore. Laurie’s is a fantastic memoir, a page-turner, imbued not only with the energy of characters like Batali and Bourdain, but with her own battered and beleaguered journey to adulthood, to motherhood, to becoming a woman in our furiously fucked up industry. I loved it.
We start in 1996. Laurie, who hails from a small village called Chittenango outside of Syracuse (it's the birthplace of L. Frank Baum, who wrote The Wizard of Oz) is whacking weeds at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (BBG) fresh off of college at Cornell. It is the year “the Unabomber was in custody, the US economy was unstoppable, and all the girls were dancing to the AOL dial-up modem sound, wearing WonderBras and clear acetate pumps,” she writes. She is “living in an illegal basement apartment in deep south Brooklyn, beneath my landlord’s own sprawling Victorian house.” There are bed bugs crawling around proudly and rainwater running under the door frame after every storm. It is not ideal.
We follow her and her vodka tonics (mostly vodka) from the BBG to a PR firm, to a job as a family’s private chef and then to the French Culinary Institute for cooking school, where she is routinely hungover and bitten by those bed bugs.
She ends up Mario Batali’s assistant, joining Babbo when it was a white hot and fueled by Led Zeppelin and testosterone, a rock and rock hall of Mint Love Letters and hard unforgiving male libido and ego.
At her job interview with Batali, he asks why she wants to be his assistant. “I really like cooking, but I want to be a food writer, not a cook. Jennifer at French Culinary told me that you’re working on a new cookbook,” she writes.
He replies: “You want to be a food writer? I’ll introduce you to every editor in town. They’re all on my dick, trying to get a reservation. Access is power, baby,” he said with a leer that made my face flush.”
We follow Laurie in scene after scene many of which are as hilarious as they are shocking — through her years with Mario, through editorial roles, until she lands with Bourdain, and through her romantic relationships, her marriage, motherhood, and divorce. Throughout it all, her addiction is a constant:
“As autumn rolled on in New York, my in- office drinking remained steady and my nighttime and weekend drinking expanded to fill more and more space, like a giant spilled bowl of soup on the floor of my waking life. My true internal condition, experienced in brief passages between hangovers and drinking, was an eddying stream of irritation, dissatisfaction, and mild depression, exacerbated by the sharp sense that I was being such an ungrateful asshole for having these feelings. I was a gainfully employed newlywed with a rent- stabilized two- bedroom apartment in Manhattan. What do you have to complain about? Look at all these fucking blessings, you piece of shit! I thought, and then I would drink and smoke my way through the rest of the day.”
She also holds nothing back about the shock of the early days of motherhood, when it seems there is nothing left inside you from the trauma of giving birth and your entire world has been ripped apart, with only a screaming baby to fill the hours when you really just want to fucking sleep or have a shower. (I related to these passages deeply.)
“In those early weeks, I felt that my entire life had been blown apart, and that I was just pieces of wreckage, entirely submerged in some very dark water. Everything was chaos, every hour seemed like a year, and a simple trip to the neighborhood pediatrician felt like an impossible logistical puzzle. I couldn’t get the stupid baby sling to work. I became convinced that the dark streaks in the hardwood floor were evidence of black mold. I stopped brushing my hair, rarely flossed. I couldn’t see more than a few minutes into the future.”
Of course, we get to the tragedy, when she gets the call that her friend Tony has taken his life. She is almost shocked to realize that this is something she cannot fix. “With every word [Kim] spoke, it became harder to hold on to the slippery notion that this was something we could fix, because Tony was dead, for real, forever. He had made the colossally stupid but somehow wholly plausible decision to die of a broken heart. He’d ignored all that he still had, which was more than almost anyone alive, but it didn’t matter to him, because he was a romantic, an obsessive, an addict, and he was apparently more unwell than anyone had realized. How could we not have realized?”
The end of the book takes us to her sobriety and to the hospice room with her mother, and we finally understand what will continue after everything she has endured — the care and feeding. “A few hours into the maybe-vigil, an aide wheeled in a cart with a pitcher of coffee, juice boxes, packets of Oreos, Lorna Doones, Fig Newtons, and Cheez- Its, and that’s when I knew my mother’s death was imminent. You didn’t get these snacks if your loved one was just having a bad day. Still, when I left that evening, I told her, “I’ll be back for Thanksgiving. See you next week.” She was quiet then, and she died two days later, while I was back in New York. When my sister called to tell me the news, I was unsurprised and hugely relieved. I walked to the grocery store and bought all the things I needed to make a batch of macaroni and cheese for me and Eli, who would be home from school soon.”
Care & Feeding has it all. There is toe-curling whiplash-inducing drama you might expect from a book about someone whose life was intimately entwined with two of the most successful men in the food world — one notorious and the other beloved – but there is also all of Laurie’s pain on the pages – she does not hold back on the feelings we all endure mostly silently; the fear, self-doubt, humility, shame, loss, and grief. We look at the questions that visit us all — and she does it with a frankness that is often quite poignant and funny. How do you love? When we fill up with regret, how do we let it go? What do we do with the pain?
I loved this book – it’s part Marco Pierre White’s The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef, part Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, with a dose of Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl. It’s for lovers of food, of scandal, of pain on the page, of addiction and sobriety, of loyalty and betrayal. It is for anyone who has struggled with self-doubt, with a cloud of shame. It’s for the ones who want to pull back the curtain on the crash and burn of Mario Batali and the intimate details of the devastating loss of Bourdain. It is about living, about putting one foot in front of the other when all you want to do is have another vodka. It’s about care and feeding, not just of everyone else, but of yourself, too. Pick it up.
Gorgeous review! Sounds like a must-read, and I’ve just added it to my list thanks to your own words. Bravo!
Beautiful piece, Andrea! I’m on page 89–it arrived yesterday.