Anthony Bourdain’s Assistant Laurie Woolever Reveals His Eerie Final Texts to Her in Emotional Memoir (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Five minutes before her Zoom interview with PEOPLE is scheduled to start,Laurie Wooleveris logged on and ready to talk. Her boss, the lateAnthony Bourdain, was notoriously punctual, and now “if I’m not five minutes early, I’m late,” she says with a shrug.

“Assistant maybe doesn’t feel like the most accurate title,” she says of her relationship with the chef turned writer and host. “Chief of staff? But it was a staff of one.”

In a job so intimate, Woolever and Bourdain, whom she referred to only as Tony, developed a working relationship and a trusted friendship. “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,” she says. “And I’m in the position of helping him get reacclimated into life.”

Laurie Woolever.Karsten Moran/The New York Times/Redux

Karsten Moran/The New York Times/Redux

She has a “running list” of things she’d love to tell him.“Wouldn’t it be great if that dream was real? And I got to be the one to say, ‘Dude, there was a pandemic in 2020.’ And ‘You would not believe what’s happening with global politics right now. There’s this showSuccessionthat I think you would love — andThe Bear!’ ”

Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever in Dong Ba market in Hue, Vietnam, in March 2014, during a shoot for Parts Unknown.David Scott Holloway

David Scott Holloway

Her time with Bourdain is detailed inWoolever’s new memoirCare and Feeding(out March 11). “But it’s not a typical tell-all, behind-the-scenes assistant’s memoir,” she clarifies. Instead her anecdotes — like one hectic excursion to procure a bucket of KFC in Sri Lanka so they could eat fried chicken and drink whiskey on the hotel roof — are woven within her own story of parenting, infidelity and addiction.

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Laurie Woolever, on her job as Bourdain’s assistant"I don’t know that I ever would’ve left"

Laurie Woolever, on her job as Bourdain’s assistant

“I don’t know that I ever would’ve left”

Woolever had an “active journal practice,” which became her guide when she was ready to write her own story. She also had years of emails and texts with Bourdain to reference. In June 2018 she had what would be her final exchange with Bourdain. He was filming an episode of CNN’sParts Unknownin Alsace, France, when paparazzi photos revealed that his girlfriend,actress and film director Asia Argento, wasallegedly having an affair.

“We talked about that and then also about 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.”

His death came at a time when her own world was imploding — three weeks earlier, Woolever’s husband had discovered she was having an affair and they decided to separate. “A one-two punch,” she says.

Laurie Woolever and Anthony Bourdain in Queens in 2016. “Once a year I would choose from the list of locations they were shooting Parts Unknown, and I would go,” she says.CNN

CNN

Woolever views her memoir as her “detaching from the role as Tony’s assistant,” but still welcomes reminders of their time together. “His things that were interesting and valuable weresold at a charity auction, but then there were just some ordinary things left,” she says. “I have Tony’s laser printer. I use it all the time, and I think of him.”

Read on for an exclusive excerpt from her book,Care and Feeding.

‘Thanks for the Company’

In 2002 her then boss Mario Batali suggested Woolever help Anthony Bourdain write his new cookbook.

Bourdain hired her to be his assistant.

More than six months passed before I saw him in person, at a poetry reading. Shortly before the reading started, I spotted Tony, entering the auditorium from the back. As I approached him, and he saw me, I saw in the slightly defensive set of his face and body language that he didn’t recognize me. “Hi, I’m your assistant, Laurie Woolever,” I said, holding out my hand to shake his. He looked startled and then laughed, his face now slightly sheepish.

Woolever and Bourdain’s working relationship evolved into a friendship.

We had dinner at a Thai restaurant, and we were murdered with food, about twice as much as what we had ordered, and almost all of it spicy in a way that inflicted pain that then gave way to an endorphin rush of pleasure. After dinner, as he shifted a rumbling Challenger into park outside the hotel garage, Tony said, “Thanks for the company,” which startled me. I’d assumed that Tony took me to dinner out of a sense of professional obligation, and that he would always rather be alone, given his slight but enduring awkwardness in unstructured social situations. That he would prefer company to being alone at dinner was new information.

Bourdain went public with his girlfriend, actress Asia Argento, in May 2017.

Tony called midweek, asking me to handle a situation with theNew York Post. An Italian tabloid had just published a story about Tony and his new girlfriend Asia Argento, complete with a Roman street canoodle photo, and thePostwanted to be first with the story in the U.S. “Verbally confirm with the reporter that it’s true, nothing more, and don’t leave any fingerprints that this info came from our camp,” he said. Successfully managing this bit of business was the highlight of my week.

Asia Argento and Anthony Bourdain in 2017.Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic

Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic

Woolever says Bourdain was in “obsessive love” with Argento.

In June 2018 Woolever got a Google alert that photos of Argento kissing a French journalist had been published.National Enquirerasked her for comment.

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 theEnquirerpiece drops.” A [Parts Unknown] producer Helen had heard that things were apparently tense on set in France, and everyone was walking the tightrope, trying to give him both the emotional support he seemed to need and the space to process his pain with a measure of private dignity. 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. At  4:25 the next morning, my phone vibrated on the windowsill next to my bed, waking me from a light sleep. It was Kim, Tony’s agent. When I answered the call, she said, “Tony has taken his life.” I thought, 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.

Woolever — and Bourdain’s fans around the world — processed his death.

It was all quite a lot: the T-­shirts, the candles, the posters, the bake sales and cookouts and negroni specials to raise money for suicide prevention work. The restaurant that created Bourdain Fries topped with escargot, Pernod, absinthe, butter, and shredded ­Gruyère? I could almost hear Tony groaning and speculating about the tensile strength of the overhead beams, using his comedy voice.

source: people.com