Care and Feeding: A Memoir

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.