Since Anthony Bourdain died on June 8, 2018, he has been Googled 10 million times. There have been five million searches about his death, three million about his suicide.

Those are outrageous numbers, but Bourdain was an outsized public figure. He had a travel show that people actually wanted to watch, and it powered a network. He earned about $4 million a year. Everyone knew him, and he knew everyone --- he knocked back beers and ate cheap noodles with Barack Obama in Vietnam.

There was a punchline almost no one knew --- he was nothing like the guy he played on television.

"If there’s a tragic moral to the end of the Anthony Bourdain story, it’s that he had no allies, no friends who dared to intervene. He was alone, unable to look for a soft landing..."

In high school, he was “a pretend martial artist and aspiring druggie” who graduated 31st in a class of 38. He’d say, “I travel around the world, eat a lot of s—, and basically do whatever the f— I want” and “Not giving a s— is a really fantastic business model for television.” A friend knew better: “Tony was shy as f— and awkward as f—.”

And lonely. His ex-wife was his rock, but success took him away from her guidance and his young daughter. “I travel 200 days a year,” he said. “I make very good friends a week at a time.”

Then he became obsessed with the worst possible woman. Asia Argento was a 41-year-old actress, the single mother of two children, and having a hard time paying her rent. “I find myself hopelessly in love with this woman,” Bourdain wrote to his ex-wife. Charles Leerhsen does remarkable reporting to deconstruct their romance. Argento refused to deal with him, quoting Oscar Wilde: “It is always Judas who writes the biography.” Bourdain’s family also rejected Leerhsen’s account. According to his brother, Christopher, “Every single thing he writes about relationships and interactions within our family as kids and as adults he fabricated or got totally wrong.”

I can understand their pushback. This is an unspeakably sad story. A man wants to cook, and he wants to write. Eventually he writes a story, his mother gets it to David Remnick at The New Yorker, it’s published, and overnight he’s famous. He leaves the kitchen, acquires a television series, and, episode by episode, he becomes a bigger and bigger celebrity. It seems the bill will never come due. You read on, faster and faster, not only because you know how it ends, but because you want all the beats that you trust Leerhsen to deliver. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

Hate. And more: self-hate. Bourdain fired longtime crew on a whim and became the boss from hell. He drank heavily and found relief only with prostitutes. “I hate my fans, too. I hate being famous. I hate my job,” he texted his ex-wife. “I am lonely and living in constant uncertainty.” No surprise that when he looked in the mirror, he hated what he saw. Leerhsen puts it more kindly: “I think at the very end, in the last days and hours, he realized what he had become.”

It’s popular to blame Argento for pushing him over the edge. That makes him the victim, doesn’t it? And it’s convenient: a good man brought down by a bad woman. Leerhsen begins the book with their final texts:

Bourdain: Is there anything I can do?
Argento: Stop busting my balls
Bourdain: OK

Too easy, I think. If it hadn’t been Argento, it would’ve been someone else. As the I Ching reminds us, “A drowning man isn’t picky about who throws him a rope.” The trick in life is not to let it get that bad. Survivors create communities or join one. They seek foundational relationships. They reach out to friends and therapists. If there’s a tragic moral to the end of the Anthony Bourdain story, it’s that he had no allies, no friends who dared to intervene. He was alone, unable to look for a soft landing and the life-affirming feeling of his steps on the earth, the embrace of people who loved him, and his place at the dinner table with his daughter, asking about her day.