I graduated from college in 1996 and moved to New York with three things: a vague ambition to be a published writer, a yawning desire for validation, and a love of feeding others. My parents had taught me to keep my head down and do my work, accept what’s offered, show up early, be polite, become indispensable. Beyond all that, I didn’t have much of a plan for the rest of my life.
I learned to cook at a professional level, so that I’d have something to write about, and a practical skill with which to earn a living. I had the good fortune to stumble into the food world at a time when cooking and eating became an increasingly respectable and well-documented form of mainstream entertainment. Thanks to even more good luck and timing, I had the benefit of two superstar mentors.
The first was the chef, restaurateur, and TV host Mario Batali, for whom I worked as an assistant for nearly four years. He already had a high profile, but was still at the beginning of a wildly successful expansion of his business empire. Working with Mario was exhilarating and educational, and it opened up a world of opportunities for me.
The second was chef-turned-author-turned-TV-host Anthony Bourdain, who was nearing the apex of some high-altitude professional mountaintops when he hired me, a new mother burned out on corporate media, as his assistant. The job got bigger and more rewarding in the nine years I worked with Tony (the only name by which he ever referred to himself), until his death by suicide in 2018.
In different ways, my two mentors, Mario and Tony, built their careers and reputations on the glamorous appeal of wild excess, and for a long time, this gave me a plausible excuse to live the same way, in order to be successful, get attention, and fill myself up with everything that the world had to offer.
Under the cover of “creating experiences” and “having a good time,” but really to blunt my big feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, and ennui, I became a self-destructive binge drinker and chronic pot smoker, dabbling in pills and cocaine. There were a few unambiguous alcoholics in my family, sure, but I didn’t see myself that way; it took me a very long time to recognize the pathology in my own behavior. I almost always had a job, and when I occasionally fucked something up, I never considered my addictions to be a factor, and only rarely admitted to myself that they were addictions at all. I’d succeeded at becoming a published writer, and along the way I became a wife and mother. I was never arrested (because I was lucky), never crashed a car (because I stopped driving), or fell down a staircase (because I lived in a ground-floor apartment).
Every time I drank or got high, I was trying to re-create the experience of chugging my first wine cooler and inhaling my first bong hit, during which my brain and body were flooded with a sense of relief and escape, weightlessness, a soft and sparkling departure from my overwhelming adolescent concerns: social and academic pressure, boredom, body shame. Everything was funny, and nothing much mattered. My life wasn’t particularly bad—it was an ordinary teen life—but these readily available substances felt like a seductive shortcut to happiness. As is the case for many addicts, my emotional growth hit a wall at about age twenty-one; in sobriety, I am now catching up, and growing up.
In his review of a book about the life and death of Tony Bourdain, New York Times critic Dwight Garner wrote, “Most human beings have more desires than opportunities in life. Those whom the gods will destroy are provided with desire and opportunity in equal measure.”
This is my story of being a (relatively) high-functioning addict in a world of irresistible temptation, led by a desire to emulate the charismatic men who guided my career. I kept it together until several successive implosions—careers, marriages, reputations, lives—showed me that I am in control of almost nothing beyond how I choose to care for (and feed) myself and others.