Care and Feeding: A Memoir

We're thrilled to offer copies signed by Laurie Woolever.

Frank, funny, and insightful as it plumbs the depths of early twenty-first-century New York’s high-powered food scene, this memoir explores Laurie Woolever’s personal and professional ascents, catastrophes, and growth.

The most prominent outside forces in Woolever’s life were two celebrity chefs riding high on publicity with whom she ended up working closely: Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain.

“In different ways,” Woolever writes, Mario and Tony “built their careers and reputations on the glamorous appeal of wild excess, and for a long time, this gave me a plausible excuse to live the same way, in order to be successful, get attention, and fill myself up with everything the world had to offer.”

Drugs and alcohol, along with the sometimes “easy effort-to–validation ratio” of media doors which opened because of Woolever’s association with big names, were treacherous companions. So too were the seemingly effortless talent and confidence that Batali and Bourdain could display, even while expecting Woolever to translate their ideas into practical forms.

Woolever’s mistakes were her own, however, and she owns up to them unflinchingly in admirably vivid writing.

Hardcover.