Care and Feeding

Laurie Woolever | Paperback | April 2025

Laurie Woolever - co-author of bestsellers Appetites and Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography - traces her path from a small-town childhood to working at food publications and revered restaurants in New York and around the world with two of the most powerful men in the business: Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain. But there's more to this story than the two bold-faced names on her resume.

Behind the scenes, Laurie's life is chaotic, an often-pleasurable buffet of bad decisions at which she frequently overstays her welcome. Acerbic and wryly self-deprecating, Laurie attempts to carve out her own space as a woman in a world both toxic and intoxicating, while balancing her consuming work with a sometimes-ambivalent relationship to marriage and motherhood.

As the food world careens towards 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.

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Author Info

Laurie Woolever is a writer, editor, public speaker and former cook. For nearly a decade, she worked with the late author, TV host and producer Anthony Bourdain. She has written for the New York Times, Vogue, GQ, Food & Wine, Bloomberg and others, edited Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook (2004), and then spent several years as an editor at Art Culinaire and Wine Spectator. She also co-authored Appetites: A Cookbook with Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, and wrote Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, all New York Times bestsellers.