narrative essay and obit
“I travel around the world, eat a lot of shit, and basically do what the fuck I want.”
Anthony Bourdain had a way with words. According to Patrick Radden Keefe’s now-famous 2017 profile of Bourdain in The New Yorker, the aforementioned quote was the chef’s simple pitch for his CNN television show Parts Unknown. Keefe’s profile came just one year before Bourdain was found hanging in his Paris hotel room while on-location shooting for that same show. Bourdain’s suicide reverberated throughout the culinary and cultural worlds; for some, the magnitude of shock after his death was of the same caliber as icons like Princess Di and Michael Jackson.
Something interesting happens when a beloved public figure meets a tragic end. Everyone--or at least those in the loop of the cultural zeitgeist--seems to be able to remember where they were when they hear the news. The world stops for a minute, followed by weeks of mourning by fans and foes alike. But ultimately, what shocked most fans about Bourdain’s death was that it was ruled a suicide. How could a man who was so loved by so many, who led such a storied life, and who seemingly had everything one could wish for -- kill himself? Hundreds of think pieces about the stigmas behind mental health and suicide flooded the internet in the wake of his death, and a larger conversation was spawned about the prevalence of mental illness in the culinary industry, a topic Bourdain never shied away from.
"Most of us who live and operate in the culinary underworld are in some fundamental way dysfunctional,” Bourdain wrote in his 1991 New Yorker piece “Don’t Eat Before Reading,” the same essay that would be the precursor to what is widely considered his life’s finest work, Kitchen Confidential. In his genre-defining book, Bourdain detailed his early years in New York kitchens, battling his own addictions, his mental illness, and the rampant toxicity that pervaded restaurant culture. Through his masterful and intimate narration, Bourdain simultaneously highlighted both the glamorous and repulsive sides of professional cooking, chronicling his own tormented life and personality.
Born on June 25, 1956 in New York City, Anthony Bourdain was raised in suburban New Jersey, the son of a copy editor and music executive. While he developed a devotion to literature and rock music while in Jersey, it was actually on an oyster fishing expedition in France when Bourdain was a boy where he discovered his passion for food. The oyster fisher--”Monsieur Saint-Jour”--challenged the family to eat an oyster freshly plucked from beneath their boat, all of whom, with the exception of Anthony, recoil in horror. In his own words, the young Bourdain’s first oyster on the boat that day tasted not only of “seawater, brine, and flesh” but also of the future. “I was hooked.” Bourdain’s oyster adventure was the catalytic event for his proud hedonism, a label he wore with pride, alongside “addict.”
“Everything that followed in my life – the food, the long and often stupid and self-destructive chase for the next thing, whether it was drugs or sex or some other new sensation – would all stem from this moment. I’d learned something. Viscerally, instinctively, spiritually – even in some precursive way, sexually – and there was no turning back. The genie was out of the bottle.”
Epiphanies like this are not unique to addicts, but Bourdain’s tasting of what he called “the forbidden fruit” and his lifelong pursuit of pleasure that followed resonated with me in a way that few other things had. The first time I read Anthony Bourdain’s work was on my 24th birthday, and I was in rehab. Eight months after I’d graduated from culinary school and began working in New York City restaurants, my life had finally fully begun to crash down around me thanks to my crippling alcoholism. I’d known for years that I was in trouble, and that I’d eventually either drink myself to death or bottom out and go to treatment. Soon enough, the cocaine-laced, fast-paced lifestyle of a young cook in the city expedited my incipient quarter-life crisis, and I was shuttled straight to a treatment center in the dusty town of Wickenburg, Arizona. Kitchen Confidential came to me as part of a birthday gift from my family, or as I saw it, a “well, this is awkward, you’re in rehab on your birthday” care package.
My long-suffering parents had both pushed Bourdain’s writing on me in the past in an effort to inspire me to keep writing my own stories. I’d always been a pseudo-fan of Bourdain’s T.V. shows, but had never actually taken the time to delve deeper into his world--I was too preoccupied ruining my own. That night--the first time I’d been sober on my birthday in years--I settled into my twin XL bed with Kitchen Confidential, and before I knew it, there I was--in Bourdain’s world.
I felt less alone when I read Bourdain shamelessly recount his struggles with various substances and how he maneuvered himself through different situations. With each page turn, my formerly dwindling passion for life felt like it was being reignited. Bourdain’s way with words made me want to write. I wanted to share my voice like Bourdain shared his; abrasively honest, imbued with radical wit and charisma. Most of all, Bourdain’s story gave me hope--hope that I could, too, get better and claim my stake in the culinary and writing worlds. Here was a guy--and a hero in my eyes, nonetheless--who’d been hooked on some of the most devastating substances in the world and kicked them.
Like Bourdain, I wanted to be unapologetically me. I was a mentally ill, overweight, 24-year-old recovering alcoholic, but Bourdain’s writing allowed me to harness what I saw as my flaws and turn them into power objects. I realized these were the things that set me apart and made my stories interesting and worth telling. I wanted to channel my personal experiences into stories that made people laugh and feel less alone than I did.
Substance use disorder is a twisted game, one that chemically rewards the addict with white-hot bursts of ecstasy while simultaneously attempting to kill them. There’s a common saying in the recovery community, one you’ll hear at 12 step meetings across the world: “At first, the using is fun. Then, it’s fun with problems. Then, it’s just problems.” The first time that I got drunk alone was an epiphany not unlike the young Bourdain’s back on the oyster boat in France. As soon as I felt the familiar burn in my stomach and the walls of anxiety around me began to melt down, I too knew that my personal genie had erupted like a roll of mentos from my figurative bottle of diet coke.
Drinking wasn’t the problem; it was the solution, a golden salve that quelled any discomfort that came my way. Alcohol made my life feel livable, quite literally drowning my all-encompassing and paralyzing depression. I’d known for years that what I was doing was committing a long, slow suicide, but I couldn’t seem to care. But as the simultaneous fentanyl crisis began dropping my childhood peers like flies, I started to realize that I was not invincible.
When My mental health, and the ways that I self-medicated, could have eventually led to my demise. Bourdain’s story found a much more nefarious villain, one equally mystified as it is stigmatized: suicide. In an excerpt from “Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography,” the late chef’s ex-wife Ottavia admitted that, while “he had this image of, you know, this bad boy, no fucks given,” Bourdain was “actually really sensitive and really fragile.”
Recently, the CDC released a report that showed a dramatic uptick in the number of American suicides over the past decade--a fact only overshadowed by the report’s following assertion that 54% of those suicides were committed by people who didn’t have a previously known mental-health issue.
I do not know why people kill themselves, but I do know that there is not only a mental health crisis in this country, but in the restaurant industry as well. It’s about time we start taking restaurant workers seriously and treating them like humans. There is a reason that the profession is known for attracting addicts. Gritty 16-hour nights in restaurant kitchens aren’t conducive to wellness. In fact, you’d have to be crazy to want to be a chef, and most of us are. In his 2012 memoir Medium Raw, Bourdain shared his self-deprecating thoughts on those in the profession.
“In my world, I took it as an article of faith that chefs were unlovable. That’s why we were chefs. We were basically… bad people--which is why we lived the way we did, this half-life of work followed by hanging out with others who lived the same life, followed by whatever slivers of emulated normal life we had left to us. Nobody loved us. Not really. How could they, after all? As chefs, we were proudly dysfunctional. We were misfits. We knew we were misfits, we sensed the empty parts of our souls, the missing parts of our personalities, and this was what had brought us to our profession, had made us what we were.”
One can say many things about Anthony Bourdain, but as evidenced by the impact that he had on the world and on the millions of lives that he touched, “unlovable” was not one of them.