Care and Feeding by Laurie Woolever

Care and Feeding by Laurie Woolever

An Instant New York Times Bestseller!

A candid, funny, and occasionally devastating culinary 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 within the high-stakes celebrity chef culture 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, a high-functioning addict’s 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 in a story of both workplace toxicity and personal recovery, and how to hold on to the parts of her life’s work that she truly values: care and feeding.

This is a story of keeping it together, until several successive implosions—careers, marriages, reputations, lives—show that control is an illusion.

• An Unflinching Addiction Memoir: A raw and darkly funny account of binge drinking, bad decisions, and the slow journey toward sobriety in an industry that runs on excess.

• Women in the Culinary World: A candid exploration of what it takes to carve out a space as a woman in kitchen culture.

• A Cultural Reckoning: Witness the food world’s overdue reckoning from the inside, as high-profile figures face their own descents and hard questions must be answered.

“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 “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, exhilirating...These rowdy reflections enlighten and entertain." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780063327603
ISBN 10	0063327600
Title	Care and Feeding
Author	Laurie Woolever
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	HarperCollins Publishers Inc
Year published	2025-03-13
Number of pages	352
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.