“We actually can learn a lot from celebrities,” blithely begins Charles Leerhsen’s unauthorised biography of the late Anthony Bourdain, Down and Out in Paradise. But what this unnecessary book teaches the reader is that the unauthorised celebrity biography is an inherently flawed project of which there are always new depths to plumb. In this one, for instance, someone who didn’t know him picks apart a dead man’s life and legacy, publishing intimate text messages sent between him and his lover in the last days of his life – and without her permission.
Recently released in the US, the book has already stirred strong criticism. Bourdain, who died in 2018 by suicide, was a giant of the food world, who came late in life to an unlikely career as a roving traveller and storyteller chronicling the culinary culture and politics of the farthest reaches of the planet. For those of us who were fans of his sometimes ribald but always open-hearted take on life, Bourdain has left behind hundreds of hours of carefully produced television, and a number of books – not least his down and dirty memoir of working as a chef in New York City, Kitchen Confidential, which sent him stratospherically to a level of fame for which he later said he was not wholly prepared.
But this new book, according to friends and family, is factually wrong about many of its sordid details. The author and US publisher are standing behind it; it’s of note that, despite the salacious press it promised to generate and Simon & Schuster’s global reach, it is yet to receive a publishing deal in the UK and Australia.
Down and Out is written by a man who was inspired to do so, he says, when he felt the full story of Bourdain’s suicide had not been told. It is built around the discomfiting occurrence of Leerhsen having been given by a source information that reportedly came from Bourdain’s laptop, including his emails, text messages, search history, social media accounts and unpublished writings. To have all of this exposed to the world on the occasion of your death would be anyone’s nightmare; texts are often messy, and are above anything, private. Leerhsen seems to have not considered the impact their publication would have on the people who sent and received them, who are still alive and whose privacy has been invaded.
With this material being too good a publishing opportunity to give up, Leerhsen then has to pad out the rest of the book with the details of Bourdain’s life. Despite his publisher’s claim that Down and Out is “brimming with scoops and exclusive information”, Leerhsen plunders a multitude of existing pieces, even though, as he is at pains to point out, he interviewed 80 people in Bourdain’s orbit.
Leerhsen spends a good portion of time admonishing a young Bourdain for changing his views on everything from work to relationships to the kind of clothes he wore, as if we should all be calcified versions of ourselves from the age of 21, never changing, learning nothing. He dedicates much space to debating whether Bourdain was a great chef – but Bourdain said many times that he was not, preferring to say he was a moderately decent cook. In among all this rehashing of known history, we get occasional glimpses of Bourdain’s unpublished early writings, leaving to the imagination the much better book this could have been were that all it consisted of.
But far more egregious than any of this is the irresponsible way Leerhsen treats Bourdain’s suicide. The short final chapter comes off as an afterthought, as if the whole slog up to that point might have been leading to somewhere, but it is not. It never was going to, because the reasons for someone taking their life are known only to them, unless they leave an explicit explanation. Bourdain did not. And contrary to widely accepted guidelines for responsibly reporting on suicides, Leerhsen details not only Bourdain’s methods, but what he was wearing, reducing the desperate act of someone ending their life to a list of mundane facts. He also feels justified in taking a guess at his motives. This is where the book, which until here had swung between uncomfortable and tedious, crosses over into ethically indefensible. Suicides shatter the lives of those left behind. They are not material for the ill-informed theorising of journalists.
Despite his grating decision to refer to Bourdain as “Tony” throughout, as only his friends did, Leerhsen did not know his subject. Interviewing 80 people won’t bring you any closer to that goal; neither will poring over their intimate text messages. Perhaps this points to a broader problem with the celebrity biography as a whole: the sum total of a person’s life can never be contained to 300 pages. What an author concludes to be the real, unvarnished story of a person’s existence is always only going to be filtered through their own experience. No amount of research will ever lead us to truly know another person.
The ideal world is the one in which this book never existed because Anthony Bourdain never took his life. But we are not in that world. If his fans want to savour his memory, everything that he had to say, in his own words, it is right here, outliving us all.
In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international suicide helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
