She is a funny, acerbic and empathetic writer. One of the most refreshing aspects of “Care and Feeding” is that she doesn’t belabor the point that she was a hot mess. She simply inventories the handles of whiskey, rafts of gin and tonics, bottles of wine and cases of beer. She doesn’t say she’s a pothead; she’s just high from the moment she wakes up. And she doesn’t say she’s addicted to sex but is always having it, often sordidly, generally drunkenly, frequently with strangers, sometimes with colleagues. There’s little judgment, just consequences, which pile up like a car crash as the pages turn.
In this turn-of-the-century, food-and-media-world bildungsroman, Woolever moves to New York, works as a gardener and as a private chef before attending culinary school. She becomes Batali’s assistant (the only one to apply for the job). “You want to be a food writer?” he asks her upon their first meeting. “I’ll introduce you to every editor in town. They’re all on my dick, trying to get a reservation.”
Batali emerges as a munificent, peevish, boorish, sadistic rizzmaster whose ever more outrageous antics are rapturously greeted by the public. Woolever, for her part, is mostly ride or die. She matches Batali bite for bite and drink for drink even while cannily noting his proclivity to humiliate and harass those around her.
But by the time she becomes Bourdain’s assistant, after stints writing and editing, Woolever is in a marriage doomed by her frequent infidelities and constant boozing. At some point, she stabs her husband in the leg with an earring and has sex with a gigolo in Tokyo. Not good.
Eventually, the dominoes begin to fall. First, Batali goes down publicly in a barrage of exposés. Then Woolever is exposed, privately. After finding a letter detailing her cheating, her husband ends the marriage. Somewhere along the way, almost miraculously, Woolever puts down the bottle(s).