Anthony Bourdain’s longtime assistant, Laurie Woolever, has revealed his final texts to her before his death by suicide in her new memoir, titled Care and Feeding: A Memoir.
Out on March 11, the book details Woolever’s close relationship with Bourdain, whom she worked for from 2009 up until he died in 2018, as well as her own story of addiction, infidelity, and parenting.
Speaking to People ahead of its release, Woolever recounted her bond with the celebrity chef, saying that “for years, I have had these dreams where he comes back, and it turns out that it was just a big ruse where he decided to disappear for a while. And I’m in the position of helping him get reacclimated into life.”
Bourdain was 61 when he died in June 2018. He was found dead in a hotel room in Strasbourg, France, where he had been working on an upcoming episode of his CNN travel show Parts Unknown. Days before his death, reports broke that his girlfriend, Asia Argento, was allegedly having an affair.
In their final messages, Woolever said she remembers talking to Bourdain “about [Argento] and then also very normal things like, ‘Let’s schedule this doctor’s appointment.’”
“It’s hard to reconcile that he believed he would be back in New York — and then he wasn’t,” she said.
In an excerpt from her book shared with People, Woolever wrote about her final moments with Bourdain.
She said that at the time, she was contacted by the National Enquirer requesting comments regarding paparazzi photos of Argento kissing a French journalist.
“When I asked Tony what he’d like me to do about the Enquirer, he said, ‘Ignore it, and ignore any similar queries from other pubs. But let me know when the Enquirer piece drops,’” she wrote.
“The next day, Tony asked me to schedule a number of things for him — a lunch, a haircut, a doctor appointment, a private session with his jiu-jitsu trainer — for the week after his return to New York. ‘I hope you’re doing OK,’ I texted to him, and when he responded, ‘I’ll live, and we’ll survive,’ I assumed that the ‘we’ meant him and Asia, their complicated relationship,” Woolever added.
However, the next day, she said she received a call from Bourdain’s agent, Kim, informing her that “Tony has taken his life.”
Woolever’s first thought was, “We can fix this. I’d spent the last nine years, and Kim much longer than that, helping Tony meet his obligations, get where he needed to be.”
“We could, we had to, help him un-f*** the mess he made when he f***ing hung himself in his hotel room, just like he had glibly threatened to do a million times, in the face of something as minor as a bad hamburger or a delayed flight.”
Care and Feeding: A Memoir will be released on March 11.
