Care and Feeding
Laurie Woolever
Genre: Memoir
Length: 352 Pages (Hardcover)
Audiobook: 12 Hours, 45 Minutes
Publication Date: March 11, 2025
Get More Info: Goodreads | Storygraph
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Publisher’s Description
A candid, funny, and occasionally devastating, Care and Feeding by Laurie Woolever is the 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 memoir, Care and Feeding by Laurie Woolever traces her path from a small-town childhood to working 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, an 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 and how to hold on to the parts of her life’s work that she truly values: care and feeding.
Care and Feeding by Laurie Woolever is published by Ecco (HarperCollins Publishers).
Content Advisory
Care and Feeding by Laurie Woolever contains scenes that depict sexual assault.
About Laurie Woolever
“I’m a writer, editor, public speaker, and former cook. For nearly a decade, I worked as the lieutenant to the late author, TV host and producer Anthony Bourdain.
I’ve written for the New York Times, Vogue, GQ, Food & Wine, Lucky Peach (RIP), Saveur, Bloomberg, Dissent, Roads & Kingdoms, and others. In 1996, I earned my bachelor’s degree at Cornell University, after which I moved to New York, dicked around for a few years, then completed the professional training program at the French Culinary Institute, where chef-instructor Pascal Béric gave me the single best piece of advice I’ve ever received: “Don’t freak out! Freaking out is not gonna help.”
I’ve been a private cook, nanny, caterer, writer, busgirl, recipe tester, farm hand, video store clerk, and a food editor. I worked as Mario Batali’s assistant from 1999 to 2002, during which time I contributed to the writing of his books Holiday Food (2000) and The Babbo Cookbook (2002). I edited and recipe-tested Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook (2004), and then spent several years as an editor, at Art Culinaire and Wine Spectator.
In 2016, Ecco (an imprint of HarperCollins) published Appetites: A Cookbook, which I co-authored with Anthony Bourdain. Our second collaboration, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, was published by Ecco in April 2021, and hit the New York Times bestseller list at #1. In September 2021, Ecco published Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, which debuted on the New York Times bestseller list at #7. Appetites, World Travel and Bourdain have each been translated into more than a dozen languages.
I recently co-authored Richard Hart Bread: Intuitive Sourdough Baking, published by Clarkson Potter in November 2024. My memoir, Care and Feeding, was published by Ecco on March 11, 2025, and debuted on the New York Times bestseller list at #8. I co-host a food-focused podcast, Carbface for Radio, with affable shit-stirrer Chris Thornton, and am a writer for Flaming Hydra, a creator-owned newsletter collective” (Laurie Woolever, 2025).
Read more about Laurie Woolever here.
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