I don’t read many memoirs. But the ones I’ve read lately have been more in the hybrid genre --- memoir in the guise of essays or reporting. These books have elements of autobiography glimpsed through the sometimes dense context of other stories about the natural world or historical events, often in service to some broader narrative arc.

So I was about 50 pages into Laurie Woolever’s CARE AND FEEDING before I put my finger on what I found so surprising about it. Here was a memoir that felt in many ways like a throwback in narrative style, told in a single first-person voice and a linear, chronological narrative. Once I stopped trying to force the book to be something it isn’t --- and doesn’t need to be --- I was better able to settle in fully to recognize that Woolever’s story and her storytelling are complex in their own ways.

"[R]eaders might pick up CARE AND FEEDING for exquisite food writing, celebrity gossip, or descriptions of fascinating locales. They’ll find all of that in [Woolever's] remarkably entertaining life story, but they’ll also find an all-too-ordinary story of addiction and hard-earned recovery."

As Woolever acknowledges near the end of the book, it’s a novel experience for her to embark on telling her own story at all. She’s an accomplished writer and chef, but she’s spent virtually her entire career (she’s in her early 50s now) working for, or with, some of the most famous men in the food world --- specifically Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain. Readers can almost feel the decades of self-doubt that fuel lines like this: “Very few people are curious about the unknown women who prop up the work of important men. Without [them], there would have been no book or TV show or magazine work for me. The flip side of this, that the end products, credited solely to the marquee men, wouldn’t exist without the work of women like me, was both a maddening riddle and a colossal ‘no sh--.’”

So clearly Woolever’s decision to write a book-length narrative with herself at the center was hardly a simple one. Even if the memoir is structurally straightforward, it still weaves together many different strands, making it both relevant and fascinating to many different types of readers.

Some will pick up the memoir to see what kinds of “tell-all” details Woolever includes about those famous figures in the world of food. Bourdain fans will find their hero further valorized here, as she repeatedly both tells and shows readers that he was a genuinely caring and compassionate boss. He valued her contributions to his cookbooks and her ability to coordinate his fantastically complicated schedule, even as he dealt with his own loneliness and disillusionment. Her longtime professional relationship with Batali is depicted as significantly (and justifiably) more complicated. Deeply unsettling revelations about sexual harassment and assault compelled her to reassess memories of her own youthful experiences working as his assistant and sometime chef shortly after her graduation from culinary school.

Although the many celebrity-adjacent anecdotes (not to mention the plentiful mouthwatering descriptions of food) certainly will draw in many readers, CARE AND FEEDING is at its heart a narrative of addiction and the long road to recovery. Woolever recounts how she began to abuse copious amounts of alcohol and weed --- along with the occasional harder drugs --- starting in her early 20s and continuing for decades. Perhaps the high-stress nature of restaurant work helped contribute to her addiction, or maybe the sheer extravagant abundance of those with whom she associated enabled her addiction to deepen.

Regardless of the cause, Woolever relates on nearly every page the ways in which she prioritized feeding her addictions above almost everything else in her life. Some readers may find the countless mentions of heavy drinking and continual pot smoking tiresome, but that’s kind of the point. Reading these accounts, growing frustrated by her inability to see herself and her destructive behaviors with any kind of clarity, feels a bit like watching a loved one slowly destroy themselves with alcohol or drugs. It’s maddening, frustrating and even slightly boring at times, when the one constant in an otherwise chaotic or meandering life is the habitual use of substances just to make it through the day.

Woolever’s eventual recovery is satisfying but not overly dramatic. There’s no single rock-bottom moment or life-or-death crisis, nor is there a saccharine message to take away or some kind of heroic arc to her story. She is clear-eyed and sober (in more ways than one) about the cost of her addictions to her relationships, to her sense of self, and at times to her career. So readers might pick up CARE AND FEEDING for exquisite food writing, celebrity gossip, or descriptions of fascinating locales. They’ll find all of that in her remarkably entertaining life story, but they’ll also find an all-too-ordinary story of addiction and hard-earned recovery. This, too, deserves to be told --- and read --- as Woolever boldly brings her own story out of the shadows.