You may pick up Care and Feeding (HarperCollins, £22) to read about author Laurie Woolever’s relationship with Anthony Bourdain.
The celeb chef was one of Woolever’s “life mentors”. Indeed, she co-authored three books with him, as well as Bourdain: the Definitive Oral Biography, and most will know her from this association.
But to reduce the writer to her decade-long professional partnership with the late chef 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.
She covers what it means to make the best of the less appealing ingredients in life and to be honest about the overcooked truths – and in our personal lives, how to do that so whomever sitting at our table chooses to stay.
No life worth living is an easy ride. And if there is one thing to take away from Care and Feeding, it’s that a recipe worth savouring often comes from hard work and perseverance behind the scenes.
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