This episode contains profanity as well as discussion of suicide, drug and alcohol addiction,

and sex.

So please take care when listening.

In different ways, my two mentors, Mario and Tony, built their careers and reputations

on the glamorous appeal of wild excess.

And for a long time, this gave me a plausible excuse to

live the same way. This is Laurie Williver, reading from her new memoir, Care and Feeding.

This is my story of being a relatively high-functioning addict in a world of temptation,

led by a desire to emulate the successful, troubled men who guided my career.

I was given a number of opportunities, and I kept it together until things fell apart.

It would take several successive implosions, careers, marriages, reputations, lives, for me to

recognize, as I now do, that I am in control of almost nothing

beyond how I choose to care for and feed myself and others.

This is the Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show,

we obsess about food to learn more about people.

Today I'm talking with Laurie Williver. She's a food writer in New York, but she's probably best known for two other jobs she's had.

An assistant to Mario Battali and an assistant to and collaborator with Anthony Bourdain.

Laurie was working with Bordane when he took his own life in 2018.

After his death, she published a book she'd been working on with him called World Travel,

as well as one she wrote herself, Bourdain, the definitive oral biography.

Now she's telling her own story in a new memoir called Care and Feeding.

And as you heard in the excerpt at the start of the show, a lot of her memoir deals with her own addiction and how it relates to her work with both Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain.

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