Laurie Woolever's Care and Feeding is a gripping memoir spanning the food service industry, addiction, motherhood, and more, held together with humor and sharply insightful prose. Early in her career, Woolever (Bourdain) had the good fortune to work for two of the biggest names in the food world: Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain. Her life and career benefited from and was overshadowed by these superstar mentors in complicated ways.
As Woolever moved through Michelin-starred restaurants and struggling food publications, she experienced the fraught dynamics of power and gender even as those industries moved toward the #MeToo era. Her life was full of drama on scales large and small. Woolever doesn't sweep anything under the rug, instead laying out her addictions to alcohol and marijuana, infidelities, and struggles around marriage and parenthood with admirable frankness. Although readers of memoir must always acknowledge that the subject is someone's actual life, the intensity of the tension makes Care and Feeding read like a thriller. And there's a lot that can go wrong in a fast-paced world of food, drinks, and powerful men.
But there's so much more here than big names. Woolever's depiction of being a wife and mother is raw, expressing obvious care for her husband and child but also deep conflict with how much of her time and identity belongs to them, and what is left as her own. Care and Feeding is worth reading to see someone wrestling with the small boxes one is expected to fit into as a professional, a wife, and a mother while trying to make a littl (or a lot of) room to be a flawed human being. --Carol Caley, writer