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The author, a noted food writer and podcaster, discusses her culinary memoir "Care and Feeding." Doors open at 10:45 a.m. for coffee & pastries. The event begins at 11 a.m. Book signing to follow.
Registration requested, but not required.
About the Books (from the publisher):
A candid, funny, and occasionally devastating culinary memoir of a woman making her way through the food world, navigating addiction, a cultural reckoning, and an unexpected tragedy
Laurie Woolever's memoir traces her path from a small-town childhood to working within the high-stakes celebrity chef culture 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, a high-functioning addict’s 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 in a story of both workplace toxicity and personal recovery, and how to hold on to the parts of her life’s work that she truly values: care and feeding.
This is a story of keeping it together, until several successive implosions—careers, marriages, reputations, lives—show that control is an illusion.
About the Author:
Laurie Woolever is a writer and editor, and for nearly a decade, she worked as the lieutenant to the late Anthony Bourdain. She has written for the New York Times, Vogue, GQ, Food & Wine, Lucky Peach (RIP), Saveur, Dissent, Roads & Kingdoms, and more. In her career she has been a private cook, nanny, caterer, writer, busgirl, recipe tester, farm hand, public speaker, video store clerk, and an editor at Art Culinaire and Wine Spectator. She is is the author of "Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography," as well as several cookbooks. With Chris Thornton she is the co-host a food-focused podcast, Carbface for Radio. Laurie lives and works in New York City.
About the Moderator:
Daria Lavelle is an American fiction writer. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and raised in the New York metro area, her work explores themes of identity and belonging through magic and the uncanny. Her short stories have appeared in The Deadlands, Dread Machine, and elsewhere, and she holds degrees in writing from Princeton University and Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in New Jersey with her husband, children, and goldendoodle, all of whom love a great meal almost as much as she does.
