Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever, WORLD TRAVEL: AN IRREVERANT GUIDE

[1:35]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zippy Owens, you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called moms don't have time to a quarantine anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen vaccine research. And I'm the editor in chief of moms don't have time to write a new publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay. Now back to this amazing podcast. Today is the last day of my official book blast, and these did not fit into any neat categories, but they were still here. So I'm putting them all together. We have one thriller, one story, and one travel book. So I am calling this thriller travel and tales. Enjoy this last day. I hope you've had fun following along on the book blast where I've released multiple episodes a day. Sometimes I do this when I don't schedule properly and I have too many at a time. So I hope that you have found in the last, what, twelve days or something, books and episodes that spoke to you. I hope you've ordered some of the books and enjoyed and keep listening because I'll have an episode, at least one episode a day, all summer long. Laurie Wooliver is the author of An Irreverent Guide, along with the late author, TV host, and producer Anthony Bourdain. She has written for The New York Times, Vogue, GQ, Food and Wine, Lucky Peach, Sever, Dissent, Roads and Kingdoms, and others. In 1996, she earned her bachelor's degree at Cornell University, after which she moved to New York and completed the professional training program at the French Culinary Institute. She has been a private cook, a nanny, a caterer, a writer, a bus girl, a recipe tester, farmhand, public speaker, video store clerk, and an editor at Art Culinaire and Wine Spectator. Her previous book was Appetites, a cookbook which she also co authored with Anthony Bourdain. She co hosts a food focused podcast called Carb Face for Radio with Chris Thornton. She lives and works in New York City and expects that she always will. Welcome, Laurie. Thank you so much for coming on moms don't have time to read books to discuss world travel, an irreverent guide by you and Anthony Bourdain, the late Anthony Bourdain. So thanks for coming on. Of course. Thank you for having me. I know you wrote in the book about the beginning of the project, the one smoke filled conversation you had about it with Anthony before he passed away. Can you explain to listeners how this project started and what made you continue it? Sure.

[4:16]Laurie Woolever: So Tony and I had written a cookbook together previously called Appetites that was published in 2016. And we had a really good working relationship. I was his assistant, but this was a separate thing from that. And we really worked well together. I was able to fill in the places that he needed filling in and of course he had his incredible charisma and incredible platform and he was a really busy guy. So he needed collaborators in any of his projects to sort of bring them to fruition. So coming from that place in 2017, he said, Well, let's do another project. And we came up with this idea for world travel being sort of an atlas to the world through his perspective and all of the experience that he had for almost twenty years traveling for television. And it took us close to a year to get everything lined up and ready to work, just his schedule being what it was and publishing industry contracts, know, all of this stuff, it just took a long time. And we were finally ready to get to work in earnest in the spring of twenty eighteen. So, we sat down. I had come into this meeting with a list of every place he had ever been in the world and some sense of what he had done there. And so, went through this list and decided which of those places would be would make good chapters for the book. They were some of his favorite places, but there were also some places that he really loved that didn't make it into the book for various reasons. But these were places that we knew we could do, you know, substantial chapters on. And he was brilliant as usual. I mean, he had such a gift of recall. And so, you know, maybe there was a place he hadn't been in ten years and he could say, Oh yeah, let's make sure we do that bar and that place that has the hot dogs outside the bar. You know, his level of recall was astonishing for somebody who had seen so much of the world. And so, that was about an hour conversation. I taped it, I had it transcribed, and that was that became the blueprint for this book. And then he had a number of shoots to complete after that point. This was in maybe March, and he was shooting all the way up through the end of June. So he was in Indonesia, he was in Texas, he was all over the place. And I started to kind of map out my strategy for for getting the the structure of this thing up so that he could then kind of fill in his essential voice. And then unfortunately, that became the only meeting that we had about this book because he, as you know, he died in June 2018. So, I was left with an outline and a mission and, you know, the question of, Do I continue with this thing? What does it mean to write a book with somebody who is so well known and so beloved and who is no longer here? And after a couple of difficult months of thinking about it, talking to his agent, who's also my agent and consulting with his estate, we decided to move forward to see if we couldn't figure out a way to take all of the wonderful work that Tony left behind, the writing in his books, the writing he did for television, the just hilarious and off the cuff things that he would say on television,

[7:30]Zibby Owens: if we could take all of that and make it into something new. And that's what became this book, World Travel. Wow. And to your point in the middle of that, what you were saying about the local places that he visited and that he remembered so well, I loved how you had mentioned in here that that his attention on those places often completely changed what happened with them and that it, you know, obviously it was up to the owners to decide, you know, what to do with that if they turned it into something for good or if it just like ruined them the extra attention. But tell me a little bit about sort of the

[8:04]Laurie Woolever: effect of his sort of picking one of those local places. Yeah. So in the intro to the book, I call it the Bourdain effect. Yes.

[8:12]Zibby Owens: The Bourdain effect. In many cases,

[8:15]Laurie Woolever: it took a place that was an obscure little restaurant or bar or chicken shack on the beach and shown a very bright spotlight on it. Then suddenly travelers going to that place knew that this was the place that Tony had been to and it became kind of a pilgrimage for people to check out. And in some cases, it could be tremendous. It could mean the difference between a business going under or staying open and a huge boost. And then in some cases, could change the character of a place. It could maybe they see they've got double the business. Well, let's move our prices up a little bit, or let's get some more tables in here, or, you know, they start to, and I don't blame anybody for doing what they need to do to keep their business thriving. Let me be clear about that. But, know, then there's pictures of Tony on the wall. It just, it can really, it can change the character of a place to go from a sleepy little place that's got this great thing that the locals know about it, they feel comfortable going, to a place where there's lines out the door and you're kind of hustled in, hustled out, and you don't feel that same kind of authentic love that you might have felt when it was under the radar. And it can be a very unpredictable thing. And they had plenty in the time that they were making the show, when the producers would approach a business, there were plenty of places that said, you know, no, thank you. You know, we appreciate the the the consideration, but we just don't have we don't want what we know sometimes happens. That's not who we are, and that's not we're not prepared to to change in that way. So it was an individual choice for business owners and sometimes it just was sort of out of your control. So, there were some places when we were planning the book, there were some places in Rome that Tony hadn't been to in ten or fifteen years, but he loved them from the early 2000s and wanted to include them. When I myself went to Rome to sort of follow-up and see what was going on with these places, person that took me around, who was also Tony's fixer in Rome, said, You know what? These places have really changed because of for that very reason. They've, you know, it's kind of a tourist circus now. It's not that warm, friendly atmosphere and just a perfect bowl of pasta anymore. So, maybe let's look at some other places. So, it happens, you know, and it's

[10:36]Zibby Owens: like any brush with fame and attention, you know, it has to be sort of managed and at some point it gets out of your control. So, I know there's so much attention that gets paid to grief among friends, right? Grief among loved ones. But there is this whole layer of people, especially right now. And I know that I can't call him Tony because I didn't know him. But, okay, Anthony's loss came before this. But losing people that you work with, which is a different relationship because people are not often, like, able to say, well, I loved him even though I just worked with him, but there is this affection and camaraderie and like real closeness, sometimes far more than in somebody who's in your family when you work with someone on a day to day basis. So what has your experience been like with that loss? And have you found people in similar sort of work loss relationships? Like, I feel like there needs to be a whole book on like work colleague loss, right? Because it's its own animal, I would think. Yeah,

[11:36]Laurie Woolever: you're absolutely right. I mean, it wasn't, I didn't lose a family member. I would say I lost a friend. Know, I mean, Tony was my boss, but he had, he made friendships with everyone that he worked with. And this, he was basically, I would say he was my organizing principle. You know, he was I was in constant contact with him a lot of the time. I knew where he was all the time. And then, of course, you know, we had written this book together and we were preparing to write a second book. So, there was a tremendous sense of loss and just, you know, had an enormous amount of affection for him. You know, I'd gotten to know him really well over the ten years that I was his assistant. And, you know, just yeah, the grief was profound in a different way, like you said, than it would be for a family member, but no less real. And, you know, even more so, I think, for the people who made television with him because they were truly the ones that spent a lot of face to face time with him on planes, in production bands, on sets, in hotel bars afterwards. And a lot of these guys had really made their lives about the show, you know, sometimes to the exclusion of, you know, having their own families or, you know, it just demanded that kind of commitment. And I think they really loved it. So, you know, between the production crew and myself and Tony's publishing partners, there were a lot of us that were experiencing a similar shock in grief. And so, you know, we found strength in each other. I haven't you know, it's interesting, I haven't talked to other people who've had this. It feels like such a singular thing, but I suppose, you know, none of us that unique, you know, when it comes to grief and it would be interesting to explore what happens. I was doing an interview a few weeks ago and somebody asked, Well, what do you do when your boss dies and you have this very close one on one relationship? I mean, do you apply for unemployment? You know, there's no in my case, I didn't have the structure of while the job goes on because the job was Tony, you know? So, there were a lot of layers to processing and trying to figure out what comes next. And again, that was the case with everyone that was kind of in this inner circle of, well, our professional lives have just changed irreparably forever and how do we move on and what's our next step? And it's been very different, you know, across the board. Wow.

[13:58]Zibby Owens: And what do you think it was? And I'm so sorry for your loss, should say. Very, very sorry for you and the whole team and everything. And such a lovely honor to keep doing this book, which by the way is in and of itself, like, even if nothing had even I mean, this is just a really useful great book to have regardless. It's like any place I'm gonna go. I'm like, this whole section even on on LA and, like, Chateau, Vermont and, like, he's so funny about some of the things he says. I'm like, this is getting a little x rated here on some of this. Right? I was like, I can't believe they put this in. I'm obviously not gonna read it now. But anyway yeah. And and even just to look at different places and like, okay. Well, now if I go to Macau, I mean, now I'll know where to go and like Mhmm. Here we here I here I'll be in Osaka. Anyway, so just the book itself is super useful and everything, but I find the backstory of it a little, you know, just like just adds to the allure. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

[16:49]Zibby Owens: Of it. What do you think attracted everyone to him to begin with? Like, what is and what was it like to work with someone who was so, you know, a, in the public eye, but b, like such a personality in and of himself. Right? How do you manage sort of that? You know, you said guiding principle, which is so interesting, but, you know, how do you do that well?

[17:13]Laurie Woolever: Well, he was, I think, to answer the first question, I think that the reason people wanted to work with him and were drawn to that is because he a couple of reasons. He was incredibly charismatic, and this is true throughout his life. I've spent a lot of time talking to people that knew him from a very young age all the way through, and there's this very consistent observation and narrative that he just was incredibly charismatic. He was able to get you excited about whatever it was that was going on. He made things sound kind of more fun and exciting and glamorous than maybe they really were, but you were very willing to get on board with that enthusiasm. You know, was a tremendous storyteller. He was so funny, and I don't think that's a surprise to anyone who's spent any time watching his shows or reading his books. You know, he was just sort of magnetic in that way. And then also, he was a very good collaborator. He really he knew that he had a vision, he had things that he wanted to do, and he knew that he couldn't do it alone. And he was very appreciative of other people's talents and other people's hard work and was very willing to recognize it, was very willing to pull everyone along on the journey. But in my case, you know, he knew I was a writer. He knew that I was hired as his assistant, but he knew it was I had had a baby and I wanted to work part time. I had been working as a magazine editor and I needed something that was a little less intense so that I could be home with my son. And so, he understood that but he also knew that I wasn't going to be happy forever making, you know, restaurant reservations and making sure the car service showed up on time. And so, started giving me opportunities to ghostwrite, to do some line editing for the books that he was publishing on his own imprint, and then eventually to do the cookbook. And that was my experience, but that was the way that he was throughout. If he saw somebody that had a talent and that wanted to get better and move up in the world, he was very generous about helping people find good opportunities to do that. And that, I think, is not you know, that's not a given in a lot of creative endeavors. And then, you know, he had a really high standard of making really good work. And I think it's incredibly rewarding for editors, producers, directors, you know, myself as a writer and editor, to work with somebody who was who really demanded a high standard and who put a lot of value on that. And it wasn't just about turning out 30 mediocre shows in a year. It was about making 16 really excellent short films, basically. Or, you know, 10 or fewer, let's say five really wonderful titles a year on his imprint versus, you know, 25 kind of schlocky whatevers that might, you know, move in the mass market. So, those are some of the reasons why it was just such a pleasure and an honor to work with him.

[20:11]Zibby Owens: And you guys are doing another sort of collaboration, right? Isn't there another book coming out? What is that one called? Yes. So, there's another one coming out in October that's called

[20:21]Laurie Woolever: The Definitive Oral Biography. And that is a telling of his story through the people that knew him throughout his entire life. So, it's everyone from his now late mother, who I was able to interview shortly after his death, and his brother, his daughter, who's a teenager, his first wife Nancy, his wife Atavia, people he knew in high school, people he knew in college and in his early days as a cook in New York, publishing colleagues, lots and lots of television colleagues, interesting people he met along the way, you know, big names from CNN and, you know, musicians and fellow writers and just this really interesting mix of, I think it's about 91 people I spoke with, who tell their memories and their recollections of Tony and I've put it together in this sort of narrative format. And, you know, I thought I knew everything about this guy. I worked so closely with him and I knew where he was and what he was doing and, you know, what was on the horizon. And every single one of these interviews, I learned something new about him. Because, of course, when you're a big public figure and a storyteller like Tony, you do sort of curate your own myth. And, of course, we all, you know, read so much of his story in Kitchen Confidential, the book that sort of broke him out. And so, you think that's the whole story, but of course, there's always more, you know, from somebody else's perspective and things that you don't include in your story because they don't necessarily serve the narrative. And so, I got a lot of that and have a better understanding of who he was throughout his life, what his patterns were, what his motivations were. And so, I think people who were left with a lot of questions about Tony will find some answers in that book, and that comes out in October.

[22:08]Zibby Owens: Will there be an auditory component to the book? So, won't if there

[22:13]Laurie Woolever: there will be an audio book, but it won't unfortunately be all of the people speaking in their own voices. Just the logistics of making that product were a little bit just didn't line up with what we wanted to do. So, it will be primarily a written book. I liken it I mean, I'm flattering myself here, but I liken it to Studs Terkel's Working. Although those were discrete interviews, you know, one per chapter and mine is chapters that are themed chronologically with different voices depending on when people knew him at what time in his life. So, reads like a I guess it's closer in spirit to I know there was a recent Mike Nichols oral history. There was a great oral history of Saturday Night Live. So it's it's more, you know, it's it's a it's a range of voices telling their stories.

[23:06]Zibby Owens: It would still be neat to do, like, a limited edition podcast with some of the clips. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. In your spare time. Yes. Yeah. How old is your son now? Like, three? I must know. He is 12 now. He's 12. Oh my gosh. So you've been working with him for a long time. Wow. Yeah. Started working with Tony in 2009,

[23:24]Laurie Woolever: and my son was less than a year old. So now he's yeah, he may come wandering back behind me here and he's yeah, he's taller than me. He has a little mustache now. Mean

[23:36]Zibby Owens: That happened to my son. Was like, all right, where's the razor? Come on. I was like, no. We're working on that. Yeah. So aside from your work with all of his work, as a writer yourself, do you see bigger projects in the few not bigger. These are huge projects. That's the wrong word. Scratch that from the record. Other projects coming down the line and like has he inspired you to go off and pursue something maybe unrelated or what do you have planned?

[24:03]Laurie Woolever: I definitely want to continue being a writer and that's something that I've always wanted, you know, since a very young age. And it was only in the last few years that I've been able to pursue that to the exclusion of other work. It is not easy to support oneself as a writer and I know I've been very, very lucky with the projects that I've had because of Tony. And so, I want to continue that. I am going to be working on a cookbook collaboration with a chef and I've got my own collection of essays that I'm working on that I hope to publish. And, you know, we'll see what else. You know, Tony really set the example that there are so many possibilities. And just because you didn't start on a certain path in your 20s, you can make a big change and you can make big leaps and achieve great things. Know, I'm in my mid-40s now and that's how old Tony was when he published Kitchen Confidential. So, there's a kind of synchronicity there and I'm hoping to follow his path and continue to make creative work, to do writing in whatever format, you know, television, film, books. I like this life, you know. It's a very sad circumstance that got me to the place of being just a writer, but I'd like to sort of honor his legacy and his example by continuing it. There is no just a writer.

[25:26]Zibby Owens: That's true. That's like saying just a mother. No, no, no. This is not one of those things. Well, have by the way this medium publication called Moms Don't Have Time to Write. If you want to submit an essay there at any time, we would love it. Oh, great. So keep that in your back pocket. Absolutely. Just so you know. So what advice would you have for aspiring authors?

[25:46]Laurie Woolever: I think it's really important to have a consistent writing practice. And that is advice that I heard myself for years and did not listen to. And now, only now, do I have the, I guess, maturity or the hindsight just the, you know, the necessary structure to actually to do it? And it has been such a gift to understand that I have to sit down every day and I don't have to sit down all day and I don't have to write brilliant work every day, but I do have to sit down every day and give myself whatever amount of time I can to keep honing my craft and keep moving it forward. And it doesn't get better if it stays in your head. It's got to get onto the paper. And this is, you know, this is not groundbreaking advice. I know plenty of writers give that advice. And again, it was just advice that I wasn't ready or willing to accept and try out. But I think that's just very, very important that it doesn't the writing doesn't get better unless you're putting your raw thoughts on the paper and refining and refining and refining. You know, and it's sort of it's poignant. I think about how many great writers there are in the world and how it doesn't sometimes it doesn't what am I trying to say? I got very, very lucky with timing, with the people that I met, with the circumstances. And I, you know, I was able to do this book and I've got another book coming out. But I think about all of the writers who have so much talent and there's just there's so much noise in the world. There's so much static in the world that and won't necessarily get the platform and get the attention. So, guess it has to be about the satisfaction of the work and not necessarily the pursuit of the attention and the huge sales and all of that. So, you know, it's something that I have to remind myself every day. Know, I mean, the book is doing really well and I'm getting a lot of attention now. In a month, the world is going to move on, you know, and I'm still going to be a writer and I'm still going to, you know, I have to find some inspiration that's not about public validation. So, it's a, you know, it's a lesson I try and learn a little bit every day because it's easy to get caught up in all of the excitement.

[28:04]Zibby Owens: I love that you said it doesn't get any better if it stays in your head. I mean, I know you said that's advice people give a lot, but nobody says it quite that way. And I think that's why it's so neat to ask everybody this question because it's so true. Like, you can't be a better writer just thinking about it. I mean, like, no matter how much you go through a sentence or think about it before you write it, you have to just get it. Anyway, I loved how you said that. Oh, thank you. That's great. Well, this is great. Thank you for this book. I can't wait for the next for the oral history. That sounds amazing and powerful and moving. And, you know, I'm you're just doing like anyone like, if anyone were to pass away, you are like the ideal person to like, just to have someone there upholding your memory, using your words, like, you're it's such a gift what you've given to his legacy. It's just amazing. So and it can't be easy with the having the inspiration, having that light go off midway through. So the perseverance and everything, I have so much respect. So that's all. Thank you. That's very kind of you. Well, you, Laurie, and best of luck and Okay. Send us an I will. I will. Alright. Thanks. Take care. Bye bye. Bye. Thanks for listening to part of my June Book Blast. I hope you enjoy it. Come back tomorrow for more. Thanks

[29:34]Zibby Owens: and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.