In this moving, hilarious and insightful memoir, 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. Behind the scenes, Laurie’s life is frequently chaotic, an often pleasurable buffet of bad decisions at which she frequently overstays her welcome. 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, 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.

When Anthony Bourdain died in June 2018, fans around the globe came together to celebrate the life of an inimitable man who had dedicated his life to traveling nearly everywhere (and eating nearly everything), shedding light on the lives and stories of others. Now, for the first time, we have been granted a look into Bourdain’s life through the stories and recollections of his closest friends and colleagues. Laurie Woolever, Bourdain’s longtime assistant and confidante, interviewed nearly a hundred of the people who shared his orbit --- from members of his kitchen crews to his daughter and his closest friends --- in order to piece together a remarkably full, vivid and nuanced vision of his life and work.