Transcript
Introduction
Tony's unexpected death in June 2018 meant the end of anything new from him. All that he had ever written, drawn, recorded or filmed in the world was done, a complete body of work. Tony's death also marked the beginning of a year's long process of discovery, in which I interviewed 91 people who had known him, to hear their stories and learn more about him than what he had already shared in the pages of Kitchen Confidential, his subsequent works of nonfiction and on television.
This book is the result of that process. As his assistant and occasional co-author, I thought I'd already gotten to know Tony quite well. However, in talking with the people who knew him in his youth as a wayward college student, a fledgling cook, dedicated beach bum, thrill-seeking drug addict, journeyman chef, ambitious young writer, semi-reluctant television star, steadfast spouse and father, supportive friend and collaborator, I came to realize that I'd really only known a fraction of who Tony was, what motivated him, his ambivalence, his vulnerability, his blind spots and his brilliance.
As he said, "Once you became famous, you never know the consequences of getting what you want until you get what you want." When I agreed to be Tony's assistant, I've been juggling writing and paycheck-type work for many years, and there were times when I grew frustrated with the more mundane aspects of the job. But if I was going to do the work, I knew there was no one better than Tony to do it for.
And now I feel compelled to add that I'd gladly trade this life of being a real writer to resume the privileged burden of making his hotel reservations and scheduling his dishwasher maintenance, if it meant that Tony could still be here among us. Barring that, I'll settle for having helped the people he loved tell the following version of his story.
That is an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk you about today, which is Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography and is written by Laurie Woolever. So I've said a number of times before that one of the benefits of reading biographies and autobiographies is not only do you learn a lot from the life experience of somebody else and you get the profit and benefit from that, but at the end, you really feel like you know some -- the person that you read about. You get a sense of who they were as an individual, as a fellow human, right?