Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography | Laurie Woolever
Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography
By Laurie Woolever
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Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery By The Book, with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.
Laurie Woolever: Hi, I'm Laurie Woolever. And my latest book is Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography
Suzy Chase: Before diving into this book, I'd like to thank my new sponsor Bloomist. Bloomist creates and curates simple, sustainable products that inspire you to design a calm, natural refuge at home. I'm excited to announce they've just introduced a new tabletop and kitchen collection that's truly stunning. Surround yourself with beautiful elements of nature when you're cooking, dining, and entertaining, and make nature home. Visit bloomist.com and use the code Cookery 20 to get 20% off your first purchase or click the link in the show notes. Now on with the show.
Suzy Chase: You've been steeped in all things Tony, for a long, long time. You were his assistant for 10 years. You wrote books together, did some traveling with him, but since he died, you've been talking about him, making books and making films. I've heard you talk about the numbness and I wanted to ask you, have you had time to grieve?
Laurie Woolever: That's a great question. I think I have. I think the process of making these two books, Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, and before that World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, has been part of my grieving process, just to really spend time with all of the work that Tony did. And then also the people that were around him helping him make that work or be part of his life. So I think that there has been some numbness for sure, and I've talked about that, but there have also been periods of feeling very in touch with my feelings, especially in the beginning, and really throughout the process. The other day I was talking to a friend about Tony, just telling just a sort of slight little story. And I was amazed to find myself moved to tears and these things, they're very unpredictable and they just sort of come up naturally. Something that may not even be a particularly sad story, but just the reminder of the loss and the sort of senselessness of it. So I have had time to grieve. I think that now that both of these books are out in the world and I'll soon get to the end of the period of promotion for the second book, I think that will be sort of a new phase for me in the grieving process of really having made this work to honor Tony and then moving on with my life as much as I can.
Suzy Chase: I feel like at this point, you're almost a vessel for people to express their own sadness in terms of this loss. Do you feel that way?
Laurie Woolever: Sometimes I do. Yeah, I have definitely met a lot of people, most of them online and one way or another, who just reach out to say that they were very moved by the work that Tony did, they were devastated by his death, and that they appreciate that these books and that the documentary film exists and give them some more of Tony, and also in some cases, a sense of closure or answer some of their questions about the circumstances of his death. So, I think it's a larger role, or it's a larger idea, that I'm probably totally comfortable with, the idea of being the vessel. I suppose, a vessel makes me feel less sort of squeamish. I mean, he was such a singular person and he had a lot of people around him helping him to execute his vision. And I was one of those people in a way.
Laurie Woolever: So it's hard for me to accept the idea that it's just me because it isn't. The filmmakers obviously very much worked on their own. I was a consulting producer for the film, so I had a part in it, but I am not a filmmaker. And there are other people who have written about their experiences with Tony and I expect that that will continue, that there will be more books and more art and more things made in reaction to the impact that Tony had on people.
Suzy Chase: So you worked with Tony on the Les Halles cookbook published in 2004. You took the kitchen Bible recipes and edited them to more of a home cook style recipe and you also did the recipe editing. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Laurie Woolever: This was something that I had done previously. I was Mario Batali's assistant for a long time. And while I worked for him, we made a book called Holiday Food and then The Babbo Cookbook, which was really my sort of introduction to the process of making a restaurant book that works for a home cook. So I was very comfortable with this idea of talking to cooks and chefs, looking at the notebooks that they keep in the kitchen, and figuring out how to preserve the essence of a recipe so that the result tastes and looks like the restaurant version, but in some cases, maybe making things slightly more efficient, certainly scaling things way down to make the proportions make sense for a home cook and just changing the language, really. That's the real focus is changing and adapting the language so that all of the shorthand that happens in kitchens is fully explained to a home cook who doesn't have that experience of working in a restaurant kitchen.
Laurie Woolever: With the case of Les Halles cookbook, Tony was very committed to the idea that the recipes really not be simplified in any way, that they really reflect the craftsmanship of what goes on in a restaurant kitchen. And so that if somebody really wants to make country pate from scratch or make their own french fries or choucroute or cassoulet, that they're really doing it step-by-step the way that it's done in a restaurant. It was challenging and it also was really a rewarding project and I was testing everything at home. So I ate so well for that period of a year or so. I had so many dinner parties with the kinds of ingredients and the kinds of techniques that I wasn't typically making for friends, but it was like, "Yeah, come over. We'll have steaks with escargot and truffle butter and I'll make french fries."
Suzy Chase: No biggie.
Laurie Woolever: Yeah. So it was a great learning experience for me and really a pleasure to work with Tony. He was completely professional. He was already a very much a television presence by then, so he was very, very busy. Most of our work was done by email. And that would continue to be the case when I became his assistant. A lot of our communication was not in person because he was such a busy traveler.
Suzy Chase: And I do want to note you also co-wrote Appetites, which came out in 2016, the family cookbook.
Laurie Woolever: Yes. That was an amazing opportunity for me and a really fun experience. Tony knew he wanted to do a cookbook, but also knew that he didn't have the time to be able to focus on it, to do everything that goes into making a cookbook, which as I'm sure you know is quite a lot of things. It's really a project management kind of job to undertake a cookbook. Not only the writing and the recipes and the editing and the testing, but also photography and food styling and concepts and tone and working closely with the editors and with the publicists and the marketing people. I mean, it's a takes a village type project. So I was really pleased to be trusted with that aspect of helping Tony execute this vision. I did contribute a number of my own recipes to the book, and it really was a dream collaboration in a lot of ways and it's a book I'm very, very proud of.
Suzy Chase: Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography is Tony's story as told by the people who knew and loved him. The people you chose to contribute to this book are a very interesting cross section of his relationships in life, everyone from his two ex-wives, Nancy and Ottavia, his brother Christopher, to high school friends, fellow kitchen staff, members of his TV production team, celebrities, like Nigella, Eric Ripert and Anderson Cooper, or the publishing contacts he cultivated over 20 plus years of writing. One thing that struck me was three different people could have three different recollections of the same event with Tony.
Laurie Woolever: Absolutely. Yeah. It's funny, I struggled at first with how to reconcile that, to keep the narrative sort of feeling true and honest, but the truth is I think that's the way that we all kind of process memory and the way that we store things and choose to remember things. And it really just kind of reflects the messiness of reality, which can be a really beautiful thing. Actually, Nigella tells a great story in the book about how she told a story at dinner when she first met Tony, and Tony took the essential truth of the story and then kind of tweaked it a little bit, and then later retold the story in a way that made Nigella more kind of the main character of the story. And she talked about a practice in France of certain people eating aborted lambs as a sort of extremely tender lamb. And that it was an unusual thing, but it was something that she had heard of and maybe had even participated in herself, but it was more kind of a sociological example. And Tony loved that story and thought it was so fascinating. And when he retold it about her, he sort of tweaked it to make it seem as if this was something that Nigella made a regular practice of.
Suzy Chase: Oh.
Laurie Woolever: And so suddenly she became associated with this, slightly, for some people, probably a practice that might make them a little queasy or a little uncomfortable. And eventually she thought it was really funny, the idea that Tony would take the best kernel of a story and then kind of tweak it to make it the most entertaining or the most sort of shocking or attention grabbing.
Laurie Woolever: So the fact that certain people remember things in different ways and sometimes have different memories than sort of the official Tony version, I think really just speaks to Tony as a storyteller, Tony as somebody who would sometimes sand down the edges of a memory or combine characters or just punch things up a bit to make sure that it was the most entertaining and best story, and the essential truth remains but the details are perhaps a little bit in dispute.
Laurie Woolever: I addressed that in the introduction to the book that everyone's got their own version of history and we can just sort of accept that one or the other might not be exactly the way things happen, but really it's the impression that the event or the person made on the teller that that really is important.
Suzy Chase: One episode of Parts Unknown that has stuck with me was the Jason Rezaian, is that how you pronounce his last name?
Laurie Woolever: Jason Rezaian.
Suzy Chase: Rezaian, in the Iran episode. He was the Washington Post Bureau Chief, and then he was held prisoner in Iran. I credit Tony with feeling like I really got to know Jason and his wife and I was so distraught when I learned of their imprisonment. In your book, Jason talked about how he had this deep concern that CNN wouldn't end up using the segment because they were worried it would make things worse for him in prison, but they went ahead and released the segment. Tony went on Anderson Cooper to talk about it. The show wasn't the reason they got arrested, but it was the thing that made it impossible for them to be ignored. And that right there was the magic of Bourdain.
Laurie Woolever: Absolutely. Yeah. He was such a champion of Jason and Yegi. Even before their arrest, he was really impressed with them. He was so pleased to have been able to meet with them on camera when he went to Tehran in, I believe, it was 2014. They hit if off really, really well. And, and Jason and Yegi both talk about meeting Tony for television and I think they didn't expect much. They thought he would sort of swan in and maybe spend a few minutes and they ended up having about a 90 minute conversation. Of course only a fraction of that made the cut for the episode, but they really, really hit it off and really had a lot in common. And Tony did everything he could to try and agitate for their release when they were imprisoned. Yegi was released after a few weeks, Jason was in for, I believe it was 544 days, which is a significant amount of time, with the kind of anxiety and terror and just not knowing that goes along with that.
Laurie Woolever: So Tony ended up publishing Jason's memoir. He wrote about his time in the prison and Tony published it on his own imprint called Anthony Bourdain books, which was itself an imprint of Ecco.
Suzy Chase: I feel like he taught us about food, but he also taught us about historical injustices in the world that needed to be corrected.
Laurie Woolever: Absolutely. He was a voracious reader and very well versed in certain segments of history. He was very, very interested in American history in the 20th century, Cold War, spy stuff, deeply, deeply interested in the war with Vietnam, but he also was very willing and able to learn on the fly about anything that was going on in the world in a place that he was getting ready to travel to. Part of his prep for every episode was to read some fiction or some nonfiction or a historical book about the place he was going to so that he would have a context and an understanding of who the people were and what they were doing there, what the conditions of their lives were, and what did they think about when they were writing fiction or trying to document their own history.
Laurie Woolever: So he was enormously capable of absorbing lots and lots of information very quickly, and his producers would give him a book to read and he would read it overnight and be able to speak about it quite lucidly the next day. It was clear he hadn't just skimmed a book, but he had really absorbed it.
Laurie Woolever: He was definitely on the side of the underdog. And he would often talk in his voiceovers about people being sort of crushed under the wheel of whatever it was, fascist governments, or unfair, repressive regimes, or just the realities of an economic situation, or the aftermath of a terrible war. He had a real true and deep empathy for people whose lives had been disrupted by forces far outside of their own control.
Suzy Chase: Speaking of those voiceovers, I always thought those were written by his people, and he sat down in a studio and read it, but I learned that he watched the footage and did the voiceover just off the cuff.
Laurie Woolever: That's right. That's right. Well, he would watch the footage and he would write his own voiceover. There were times when the producers would write a scratch version of the voiceover just to convey to him the relevant facts that needed to be highlighted in order to make a scene make sense and hang together. And sometimes Tony would include that information and sometimes he wouldn't. He was very singular in his vision of how he wanted a show to come across. He was deeply, deeply involved in the editing process. So he would write his own voiceover, whether or not he had been provided sort of a framework by the producers. And then sometimes in the booth, he would change it up or he would ad lib.
Laurie Woolever: He was really invested in every aspect of the show. And then of course there's a lot of off the cuff talking that goes on on camera. And he was somebody who could speak in complete, coherent, often hilarious, and very deeply informed paragraphs. So a lot of what goes on on camera is him just speaking from the guts, speaking from the heart, reacting to a situation in the moment. And that some of the best quote unquote writing that he's done is just the writerly way in which he could sum up a situation that was going on around him.
Suzy Chase: I saw his sort of, stand up routine, show, thing at BAM Brooklyn back in 2016, for Appetites, the cookbook you co-wrote with him. And I've heard you talk about how, when you were in the green room, he was like, "This is all BS, that people have paid money for me to come and talk." Which boggles my mind. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Laurie Woolever: Sure. I think that was the first time that I really understood that Tony had, what I think is a pretty common affliction among people who are in the public eye, which is the sense of having an imposter syndrome, sort of not believing one' own good luck that people are willing to, to come and invest time and money to hear what you've got to say. So, one being one's own worst critic was definitely something that Tony experienced.
Laurie Woolever: So I think Tony was always striving to be better and holding himself to what was probably an impossible standard. So that's, I believe, where that imposter syndrome came before he went on stage. Now, once he was on stage, he was brilliant. He was electric, and he sold out every theater on that book tour. He was selling out two, 3000, seat theaters and people just couldn't get enough of him, but for his own self-assessment, I think there was a sense that, "I could be doing better," or, "I'm not doing it as well as the people whom I really admire," or, "I feel that I'm a fraud." Which I think is, again, a very common thing among people in the public eye/
Suzy Chase: In his day-to-day suicide was almost shtick. Did you ever catch any serious intention under the levity of talking about suicide?
Laurie Woolever: No. I never did. I was very aware that this was a very easy joke for Tony. I mean, almost a cliche at some point to just say, "Oh, my flight is delayed. I want to kill myself." Or, "This hamburger's cold. I want to kill myself." It just was like an easy shorthand for like, "This is my hyperbolic expression of dissatisfaction." We can only speculate, but knowing him as I did and knowing what I know, I truly don't believe that his death was a long premeditated act. I think it was a spontaneous, terrible, decision made in a moment of loneliness and anger.
Laurie Woolever: I do think that he had an emotional darkness. I do think that, like so many people, I think he had times of depression and times of uncertainty about life, but I do not believe in my gut that this was something that he had planned in any way. Just based on the conversations that I had with him in that week and the conversations that other people I know had with him in that week, he was very much planning a return to New York. So, I was making dentist appointments and haircut appointments and scheduling lunches and things for the following week. So, I think he just had a really tough and lonely moment of desperation, which is incredibly heartbreaking.
Suzy Chase: What was one thing you learned that you didn't know before putting this book together?
Laurie Woolever: Oh, so many things. I didn't know very much at all about Tony's mother Gladys, who was a figure who loomed large in his life despite sort of not being present day-to-day. But I learned quite a bit about her from Tony's brother Christopher, who was extraordinarily helpful in putting this book together. I learned that Gladys took great pains to conceal her Judaism, even from her own family. I'm sure her husband knew, but she changed the spelling of her last name from Sachsman, S-A-C-H-S-M-A-N, to Saxon, S-A-X-O-N. And it doesn't get much WASP-ier than that. It's Anglo-Saxon.
Suzy Chase: Yeah.
Laurie Woolever: And she was very sort of elusive about where she grew up, which was in the Bronx, but she sort of implied that it was actually the Upper West Side of Manhattan. And she just took great pains to sort of repress that part of her background, which as Christopher explained was about red lining and about very real prejudices in this country, in the 1950s and '60s. So she just felt that it was best for her and her future to present as as a WASP. And it was something that Tony and his brother didn't even realize until they were in their teens.
Laurie Woolever: That was very interesting to me that she had such an investment in sort of curating the self that she put out to the world. And I see some reflection in the way that Tony presented himself. Some of the guys that I spoke with that he worked with in kitchens in the '80 and '90s talked about Tony kind of curating this image of himself as a, I mean, he certainly did get involved with heroin and he certainly did have a heroin addiction that he wrote about himself in Kitchen Confidential. But a number of them talked about seeing Tony kind of taking up with heroin as a way to curate an image of cool and to align himself with some of his sort of downtown New York punk heroes. And that it was always a bit of an act, that he wanted to present himself as this sort of borderline criminal downtown New York junkie figure, because that was a cool image that he admired in other people.
Laurie Woolever: So I think there's an interesting parallel there, for somebody who was by all accounts, and by my own experience, quite socially awkward at times, and quite shy and reserved. This was a way for him to sort of overcome that, to curate his image of himself with swords and talk of violence and tattoos and drug addiction and all these things that sort of allowed him to leave that shy persona behind a little bit.
Suzy Chase: So food is an art form, so it can be a jumping off point for exploration into anything you want to talk about, the history of a place, politics, religion, et cetera. That's all written into the cuisine of a location. He was revolutionary when exploring street food and it was an access point that everyone could afford. He changed the way I looked at food.
Laurie Woolever: Yeah. His book, Kitchen Confidential, and before that, the essay Don't Eat Before Reading This that was published in the New Yorker in 1998, I think those two things really sent a shockwave through the food media establishment as it existed at that time. I was myself a fledgling food writer. And I remember that the only way to get a placement, to get a pitch picked up by a magazine, was to write about things that had to do with luxury and refinement and Western cuisine. And there were stories around very expensive food festivals or restaurants on golf courses. It was all about the surface and all about the highest end and the highest aspirations of food and cooking.
Laurie Woolever: And then Tony came along talking about, A, the way that things really work in even the finest dining kitchens, sort of the ugly truths or just the truths about the way that food is made and served in restaurants. And then further to go out into the world and to start looking with the same eye at affordable street level food that would never get a New York Times review or a Michelin star or any of the other traditional signifiers of quote unquote good food. I think that really, really it did, it shook up the food media establishment and it shook up people's ideas of what was worth seeking out and what was worth writing about, talking about, traveling for. I don't know that people were really traveling en masse before the year 2000 to go to places in Asia that had such vibrant street food cultures. I just think it was sort of an afterthought and Tony moved that type of food into the main event category for a lot of people.
Suzy Chase: One of my all-time favorite episodes of Parts Unknown was when Tony caught up with President Obama in Hanoi. During the pandemic, my husband and I would talk about how we miss Tony and his rants and what editorial he could have contributed to the political and social landscape. It's just heartbreaking.
Laurie Woolever: Absolutely. There are so many reasons that it's heartbreaking that Tony isn't around, but I so wish for his sake and for the world's sake that he could be here during the pandemic, and by his sake, I mean, he was somebody who had a really funny interest in medical oddities and he wrote a little book about Typhoid Mary for a series of urban historicals. It didn't get a lot of attention, but this was a book that he wrote after Kitchen Confidential. And he was just fascinated by the intersection of this woman who was a cook and was sort of defiantly spreading typhoid around the rich families of New York whom she cooked for. She was very, very unwilling to be quarantined and tested. And so he did a lot of research into the idea of an epidemic in New York.
Laurie Woolever: So I have this fantasy of Tony coming back and me getting to be the person that's like, "Dude, there's been a pandemic for two years," because I think he would be just from an intellectual standpoint, a curiosity standpoint, it would be so interesting for him to live through a pandemic. But more than that, he is a voice of reason, he was a voice of reason. He's somebody who again, had a lot of respect for and interest in the medical community. He was somebody who was not afraid to get vaccines. I mean, he was constantly getting travel medicine, which often included boosters and updates to his all kinds of vaccines so that he could to travel to places in the world where those different things were a risk. If he believed in something he would take to the airwaves, he would take to Twitter. So I would like to think that he would have been sort of a nonpartisan voice of reason, with respect to mask mandates and social distancing and certainly vaccines, and just having trust in our institutions to do the right thing, to try and get this pandemic behind us.
Laurie Woolever: So he wasn't a huge lockstep believer in everything that governments did by any stretch, but I think when it comes to listening to institutions like the CDC about vaccines, I would have to believe that he would be on the side of logic and science and reason.
Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called Dream Dinner Party, where I ask you who would you most want to invite to your dream dinner party and why? And for this segment, it can only be one person.
Laurie Woolever: Oh.
Suzy Chase: Drum roll.
Laurie Woolever: Well, this is maybe a cliched answer. I would like to make dinner for Tony. If I could have one more sit down with him and talk about everything that's happened since he left and try and convey to him somehow how important he was to so many people and that it would be worth him sticking around. I would cook anything. One one of the recipes that we both really loved from appetites was a linguine with clams, just a classic butter, white wine, garlic, herbs, clams, a little bit of clam stock. And I would happily make that. It's a bit of a pain to source the clams depending on where you are, but God I would make that in a heartbeat. And he wasn't a fan of dessert. In fact, the dessert chapter in our book is really just a photo of a wheel of Stilton. I'd bring in a wheel of Stilton and we'd have the pasta and I would try and make that dinner party go on as long as I possibly could.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Laurie Woolever: So my favorite platform, that I spend way too much time on, is Instagram and my handle is @LaurieWoolever just my first and last name together on Instagram. And I'm also on Twitter under the same handle, and I'm less active there. I find that Instagram is a great platform for visual jokes and some light self promotion, but mostly I just try and make people laugh. And then I have a website which is lauriewoolever.com and that's got a lot of the writing that I've done, information about the books, video stuff and just a little bit about.
Suzy Chase: What's coming up next for you? A vacation?
Laurie Woolever: Not necessarily. I have started working on a cookbook with a really brilliant baker named Richard Hart, who is British, but he spent six years in Northern California as the head baker at Tartine. And now he has his own bakery in Copenhagen called Hart Bakery. It's under the auspices of the Noma group. And so we are working on a book about bread and it'll have about 55 to 65 bread recipes, with a big emphasis on sourdough. That's a plug for that. So that's really the main project. And I've started to talk to some people about different television things, a scripted series, and a nonfiction sort of documentary series. So it's very early days for both of those things, but I'm really excited to get a little bit deeper into the world of television.
Suzy Chase: To purchase for Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography and support the podcast head on over to CookerybytheBook.com. And thank you so much, Laurie, for coming on Cookery By The Book Podcast.
Laurie Woolever: Absolutely. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.
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