Lizzy Harding at Bookforum:
IN 1999, AT THE AGE OF FORTY-THREE, ANTHONY BOURDAIN had all but given up hope that he would ever be recognized as a major talent in anything. For the man who would soon become famous for courting extremes, this mediocrity was a kind of torture. After a promising start at the Culinary Institute of America, he had been working in kitchens of low-to-middling repute for two decades. As a chef, he was merely competent, having spent his early years chasing good money and hard drugs instead of working his way up in high-end kitchens. Still, he was perpetually in debt, getting by largely because he lived in a rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side with the woman he had loved since high school, who kept them out of housing court by flexing the legal knowledge she had absorbed from watching Court TV. Throughout the 1980s, both were heavy heroin users. They had survived low lows (Bourdain selling his record collection on the street) and gotten clean, and now, every year or so, they went to the Caribbean for a Margaritaville vacation. But Bourdain had always thought he would amount to more. In the early ’90s, thanks to a “freakishly lucky break” courtesy of a college friend, Bourdain got a book deal. But his two novels—a murder mystery about an Italian restaurant run by the mob and a crime thriller set in the Caribbean about married expat-assassins—were, in his own words, “spectacularly unsuccessful.”
more here.
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