The Last, Painful Days of Anthony Bourdain

After Anthony Bourdain took his own life in a French hotel room in 2018, his close friends, family and the people who for decades had helped him become an international TV star closed ranks against the swarm of media inquiries and stayed largely silent, especially about his final days.

That silence continued until 2021, when many in his inner circle were interviewed for the documentary “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain” and for “Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography.” The two works showed a more complex side of Mr. Bourdain, who had become increasingly conflicted about his success and had in his last two years made his relationship with the Italian actor Asia Argento his primary focus. But neither directly addressed how very messy his life had become in the months that led up to the night he hanged himself at age 61.

On Oct. 11, Simon & Schuster will publish what it calls the first unauthorized biography of the writer and travel documentarian. “Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain” is filled with fresh, intimate details, including raw, anguished texts from the days before Mr. Bourdain’s death, such as his final exchanges with Ms. Argento and Ottavia Busia-Bourdain, his wife of 11 years who, by the time they separated in 2016, had become his confidante.

“I hate my fans, too. I hate being famous. I hate my job,” Mr. Bourdain wrote to Ms. Busia-Bourdain in one of their near-daily text exchanges. “I am lonely and living in constant uncertainty.”

Drawing on more than 80 interviews, and files, texts and emails from Mr. Bourdain’s phone and laptop, the journalist Charles Leerhsen traces Mr. Bourdain’s metamorphosis from a sullen teenager in a New Jersey suburb that his family couldn’t afford to a heroin-shooting kitchen swashbuckler who struck gold as a writer and became a uniquely talented interpreter of the world through his travels.

Mr. Leerhsen said in an interview that he wanted to write a book without the dutiful sheen of what he called “an official Bourdain product.” Indeed, he portrays a man who at the end of his life was isolated, injecting steroids, drinking to the point of blackout and visiting prostitutes, and had all but vanished from his 11-year-old daughter’s life. (...)

The book traces Mr. Bourdain’s career in New York restaurants, and his relationships with the intimidating chefs who molded him. It includes the well-known tale of how his mother, Gladys Bourdain, then an editor at The New York Times, handed an article he had written about the ugly secrets of a Manhattan restaurant to Esther B. Fein, the wife of the New Yorker editor David Remnick, who ran it in the magazine.

The story turbocharged Mr. Bourdain’s writing career, leading to his best-selling book “Kitchen Confidential.” That piqued the interest of the freelance television producer and editor Lydia Tenaglia-Collins, who developed his first show, “A Cook’s Tour” and the media company Zero Point Zero, which produced his subsequent shows.

The book delves deeply into Mr. Bourdain’s relationship with Ms. Argento. The two were involved for about two years in a tumultuous and very public relationship that, Mr. Leerhsen writes, Mr. Bourdain seemed willing to do anything to preserve.

“I find myself being hopelessly in love with this woman,” he wrote to his wife. (...)

Five days before his death, Ms. Argento was photographed dancing with the French reporter Hugo Clément in the lobby of the Hotel de Russie in Rome, where she and Mr. Bourdain had stayed together. Mr. Bourdain was incensed, the book says; over the course of the next few days, he searched her name online hundreds of times, and the two argued over text and phone.

Mr. Leerhsen is not the first person to try to explain the unknowable: why Mr. Bourdain killed himself. His book offers a theory.

by Kim Severson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Alex Welsh for the NY Times