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 bestselling 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.
About the Author
Laurie Woolever is a writer and editor. She spent nearly a decade assisting Anthony Bourdain, with whom she coauthored the cookbook Appetites and World Travel. She’s written about food and travel for the New York Times, GQ, Food & Wine, Lucky Peach, Saveur, Dissent, Roads & Kingdoms, and others, and has worked as an editor at Art Culinaire and Wine Spectator. She is also the New York Times bestselling author of Care and Feeding and Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography.
Praise For…
“[T]o reduce the writer to her decade-long professional partnership with the late chef [Bourdain] would be an injustice. She has carved out a rich and long writing career in an increasingly fragmented media industry – the result of her talent, irreverence, resilience, and just a pinch of being in the right place at the right time….This memoir offers a glimpse behind the scenes of food making and writing in the 1990s and early 2000s, portraying the culinary world of that time as one of misfits, dreamers, obsessives, the passionate and the hopeful. The author herself embodies all the above…Woolever’s memoir – which recounts her personal struggles with wry self-deprecation – is inspiration to all of us who chose food as the headline of our professional lives.” - The Grocer (UK) “Gritty, unflinching, powerful.” - Nigella Lawson “Care and Feeding is literary proof that the lives and stories of women so often pushed behind the scenes are always so much more interesting, dynamic, and delicious than the stories we’ve been sold. Woolever's voice, representing women born into a particular kind of world that required shapeshifting and quiet transgressions, is now loud and clear and heroic.” - Lisa Donovan, author of Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger “You ever clam up around a person because you think they’re so cool and smart that whatever you say will land like an insect on their intellectual windshield? That’s how I feel about Laurie. The only difference is that she’ll slow the car down to not let you splatter, no matter how wittily her mind is racing. Something rare happens when deadpan humor meets sincerity. It’s like when acid hits an oil. Emulsion. Care and Feeding feels so cinematic, almost fictional, yet incredibly real. This is a wonderfully written memoir that reads like a novel, with the most stupendous characters to boot. I know this book is largely about overcoming addiction and being able to write about it on the other side, but call me addicted, because I cannot put this book down!” - Roy Choi, chef “I was riveted by this fast-paced, scrupulously honest, and searching memoir that leaves no stone unturned, from the restaurant-world insider adventures of Laurie Woolever’s early career and the outsized personalities she encountered along the way to her heroic and unvarnished struggles with marriage, motherhood, and work. Fans of Woolever’s writing about Anthony Bourdain will not be disappointed by this deeply personal and elegantly wrought story of sacrifice, love, and everything Woolever ate and drank along the way to her current hard-won happiness and sobriety.” - Emily Gould, author of Perfect Tunes "A deliciously juicy, profoundly-relatable, and thought-provoking ride, an exploration of how we survive male-dominated worlds when the deck is so often stacked against us." - Jennifer Romolini, author of Ambition Monster "Profane, exhilarating...These rowdy reflections enlighten and entertain." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) “An intimate dispatch from an inside player...[A] fundamentally kind and generous book. [Woolever] is a funny, acerbic and empathetic writer. One of the most refreshing aspects of Care and Feeding is that she doesn’t belabor the point that she was a hot mess….She feeds. She cares. And we read and care too.” - New York Times "The success of Care and Feeding is in Woolever’s keen storytelling. She knows how to craft a story, and guide us along multiple paths simultaneously...She allows us in, and we can see ourselves reflected in her success and failures...while Woolever may have found identity in her proximity to powerful men, in telling her story, she reclaims her own narrative, and is well on her way to becoming a celebrity in her own right.” - Chicago Review of Books Care and Feeding is a blisteringly candid and laugh-out-loud account of hedonism and heartbreak. - Guardian
