Laurie Woolever
Appearances
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
drinking on the job, joking around, there's silence in the kitchen. That was not my experience. Things were a little looser, a little bit more fun. And this was the late 90s and early 2000s. So that was a specific point in time. I do think that kitchens remain a high pressure, high stakes environment. There is a lot of goofing around and a lot of camaraderie, a lot of ways to blow off steam.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
But I do think that things have changed for the better. That's my anecdotal understanding from speaking to friends who are still in the business.
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SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
I think at the time, survival meant getting along with people, going along. If there was someone that was in power that was doing something untoward or uncomfortable, it was about—and this was my experience, and I wrote about it in the book— I tried to diffuse it quietly and privately and not to make a scene about it because I knew that would lead to blowback.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
I think survival was just making and saving enough money to be able to live in New York City. And in some ways, that is still the case. It's working as a writer, living in New York, raising a child. It is continuing to hustle every day to try and make money. But I think that I am a much more confident person now and a much more calm person now.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
I did give up drinking and doing drugs several years ago, and that has made a big difference in my life. So in a lot of ways, it's easier to survive and to get by when your life is quieter and calmer and not so chaotic.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
It was really exciting to be headquartered at Babo, to be at this place that had just opened to huge critical acclaim. There were a certain number of seats and probably 10 times as many people looking to get a seat in the restaurant every single night as there was availability. So that really just led to an electric sense of I'm in the center of something really great.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
And my colleagues were all at the top of their game, young and youngish and very excited about being somewhere that was really one of the best restaurants in New York. And all of that came with access to opportunity for me. Mario had a lot of power in the marketplace and media, real estate, business. And so he was able to connect me with a lot of people who were helpful to my career.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
He helped me to get bylines as a fledgling food writer and really just kind of established me in a scene in New York that was very appealing to me.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
Over the course of being Tony's assistant, which was just under a decade, I definitely found that I was getting more and more opportunities. As Tony's star rose, he got busier and busier, and I was very valuable to him as an assistant, as an administrator. But he also knew that I wanted to be a writer.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
And so he started to give me opportunities to get involved with things that were more gratifying to me intellectually. I did some line editing on some of the books that he published on his imprint. And then we ended up writing a cookbook together called Appetites that came out in 2016.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
So as time went on, I continued to get more and more responsibility to collaborate and to work with him on exciting creative projects.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
I had mixed feelings about it. It felt a little jarring and slightly unfair to have to take any responsibility for... harassment and alleged abuse and things that I didn't really feel that I had any part in. Where I landed on it ultimately was that I was part of a culture in which this was very, very normalized.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
And as much as it's not okay to be touched inappropriately at work or to be ever to be abused or assaulted in any way, It was the lower end of things. This was kind of normalized in the late 1990s and early 2000s when I was working around him. And so I had to look at my part in it, look at the part that I played in not more vocally pushing back, but also...
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
just recognize that none of these things happen in a vacuum and it's not really black and white. And as much as I benefited from being around Mario and having access to some of those channels of power, that it was also ultimately kind of a toxic environment that I spent many years in. So it was a complicated kind of personal reckoning.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
I can only speak to my own experience in terms of kitchens where I haven't really been in kitchens in a long time. Women made up probably half the kitchen staff or a little less than half the kitchen staff when I worked at Babo. So it wasn't that we weren't necessarily invited or included, but that you had to work a little bit harder or maybe a lot harder to prove that you deserve to be there.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
My understanding now from speaking to chefs who are still active in kitchens and speaking to cooks and people in the industry is that there have been some changes. It's not completely linear. And I think there probably will be ebbs and flows of progress and regression. But I think that.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
Many restaurateurs got scared in 2017 and thought about how do we put some structures in place in the workplace to prevent things like this from happening and or to have a way to react in a cohesive way if someone does have a complaint. So I think you see more HR structure, just more supports, more communication between management and employees. But it is what it is.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
As they say, people are people. Stress is stress. Relations between men and women are what they are. And I think there always will be sort of a looser environment than maybe in an office or another type of workplace. But I do believe that there have been some changes.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
Thank you for having me. Very happy to be here.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
I think one thing that really was so powerful that I learned from Tony, and I saw it, he talked about it, I think other people experienced this too, was this openness to the idea that I don't know everything. And I probably can't ever know everything about a subject, about a person.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
And he had this really incredible way of staying open-minded, of asking questions, of being willing to be proved wrong and even sort of enjoying being proved wrong if it meant that it would deepen his understanding of a subject or a person or a situation. So I try and remember that.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
I try and move that way to not stay completely fixed in my judgment of a situation or a person, but to try and keep... Turning something over to understand all the angles of it. And then as far as his death and what I learned, you know, I got practice in managing grief in a way that I hoped I never would have to, but that is part of life is death.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
And also recognizing that much like he knew there was always more to learn, there's always more to learn about a person. And so when I spoke with people that knew him for the biography, I must have spoken to between 90 and 100 people. And I learned something new about him from every single one of those people.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
And I was quite sure when I started that I knew everything there was to know about this guy. And it was really... in some ways, a pleasure to be proven wrong, to know that whatever someone shows you or tells you, there's always more to a person going on under the surface.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
I had a good friend I was talking with about my career a few years ago and just sort of describing the different high and low points. And she said, gosh, you know, you really have made a career out of the care and feeding of difficult men.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
And I had never framed it in that way, but it made so much sense to me that even whether it was with Mario or Tony or working in various publications that were helmed by men or working as a private cook, there were challenging aspects of everyone's personalities or everyone's lives that I had to manage. And I think I've develop some skill in that area. So that's one explanation for the title.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
And then also there's a lot of cooking and feeding and self-nourishing or self-neglect and all of that that goes on throughout the book. At some point I get engaged, I get married, I have a baby, my marriage falls apart. And each step along the way, there's some aspect of trying to keep things together in part by keeping people well fed.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
Yeah, I think this has got to be the final word for me on those jobs. I would not be where I am without either of those two huge presences, but I don't want the rest of my life to be just relitigating and retelling these stories. So moving forward, I really love collaborating with people and helping them tell their stories.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
Yeah, I will say that the world of restaurants and professional cooking that I entered into was very high pressure and very high stakes, but also a lot of fun. There was pretty easy access to alcohol. But I do want to say that my perspective comes from one specific restaurant. So I think that there is a range, certain fine dining restaurants, there's a very low tolerance for alcohol.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | “Bourdain” author shares her story in new memoir
I would love to find someone that has an amazing story to tell and needs a writer to help them get it on the page. I am working on a cookbook collaboration with Chef Ryan Bartlow, who has a restaurant in New York called Ernesto's. And I do love that kind of work, too. So, you know, it's just I'd like to keep writing books and figure out a way to keep the rent paid.