“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):
“‘I’m back on the bottom!’ I said, every time I told someone that I’d left Wine Spectator to become Tony Bourdain’s assistant. I was only half to three-quarters joking.... I knew that it was a weird backward move, the downgrade from full-time editor to part-time remote assistant, so I reflexively insulted my choice to beat everyone else to the punch. I didn’t yet know that almost no one gives a shit about a change in your career, up or down the ladder, unless they are personally impacted by it.”
But once I put words to paper, it was undeniable: I was the only one keeping score.
When I left my hard-won editor job, I was 35 years old, an exhausted and overwhelmed new mother who had once dreamed of rising through the ranks of a magazine, at a time when such magazine jobs were already disappearing into the voracious maw of consolidation and shrinking ad revenues, a time when the dinosaurs of print publishing were just waking up to see their rarefied worlds crumbling into pixels all around them.
Looking for an alternative to my unfulfilling job, which required stashing my infant in day care for 50 hours per week, I reached out to everyone in my network, including Tony Bourdain, whom I knew a little bit from having helped him with his first cookbook. To my great surprise, he asked if I’d like to be his assistant, and I said yes.
Working with Tony was a curious mix of the mundane and the sublime. I scheduled haircuts and doctor visits, confirmed his car services and flights, and sorted the heaps of fan mail that came into his production office and Les Halles, the restaurant where he was working when he first rose to fame with the publication of Kitchen Confidential. I also rode on the back of his scooter through the chaotic streets of Hue, Vietnam, shot a scene with him at Aqueduct Racetrack for the Queens episode of Parts Unknown, and traveled with him on the tour to promote our co-authored cookbook, Appetites.
My misplaced concern about people judging my choice to leave publishing and assist Tony was borne of the now outdated idea that being on a magazine masthead conferred a level of status that I’d be crazy to voluntarily forfeit. Others in my position, who had been editors and staff writers much longer than I had, and who had seen their perks, titles, solo offices, and unchecked expense accounts slip away, had already begun plotting moves into tech or retail, cracking open their trust funds, or God knows what else.
I also worried that I was too old to be an assistant. More than a decade prior, I’d become the assistant to chef Mario Batali, a job I left in part because I believed myself to be aging out of the mundane administrative tasks that the position required.
Yet, as my own words revealed to me, no one but me actually cared that I had taken a status cut. If anything, people were mildly impressed, given the stature of my new boss, or mildly jealous, because I got to work mostly from home a decade before the pandemic.
I can thank Didion (and others, including E. M. Forster) for pointing out the role of writing in self-discovery; and for my “no one cares” epiphany, I have to give some credit to the grand tradition of 12-step recovery, of which I am a big fan. There are, within its literature, many suggestions to recognize oneself as more alike than different from one’s fellow man, a “worker among workers,” rather than the center of the universe—an important reminder for turbulent times, when our shared humanity, the power of being one among many, matters more than ever.
Laurie Woolever is a writer and editor. She spent nearly a decade assisting Anthony Bourdain, with whom she co-authored Appetites and World Travel, and is the author of Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography
