“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear,” wrote Joan Didion, in a 1976 essay called “Why I Write,” for The New York Times Book Review.
I didn’t truly know it until I wrote—in my memoir, Care and Feeding—about my status anxiety around becoming the assistant to Anthony Bourdain (or, rather, “Tony,” the only name by which he ever referred to himself):
