Noted food writer Laurie Woolever discusses Care and Feeding, her candid memoir of making her way through the culinary world while navigating addiction, a cultural reckoning, and an unexpected tragedy. Doors open at 10:45 a.m. for coffee and pastries. Book signing to follow. Register here. 

Laurie Woolever's memoir traces her path from a small-town childhood to working within the high-stakes celebrity chef culture at revered restaurants and food publications, alternately bolstered and overshadowed by two of the most powerful men in the business: Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain. Laurie attempts to carve her own space as a woman in this world that is by turns toxic and intoxicating and she seeks to try it all, from a seedy Atlantic City strip club to the Park Hyatt Tokyo, from a hippie vegetarian co-op to the legendary El Bulli, while balancing her consuming work with her sometimes ambivalent relationship to marriage and motherhood.

As the food world careens toward an overdue reckoning and Laurie’s mentors face their own high-profile descents, she is confronted with the questions of where she belongs in a story of both workplace toxicity and personal recovery, and how to hold on to the parts of her life’s work that she truly values: care and feeding.

Laurie Woolever is a writer and editor, and for nearly a decade, she worked as the lieutenant to the late Anthony Bourdain. She has written for the New York Times, Vogue, GQ, Food & Wine, Lucky Peach, Saveur, Dissent, Roads & Kingdoms, and more. In her career she has been a private cook, nanny, caterer, writer, busgirl, recipe tester, farm hand, public speaker, video store clerk, and an editor at Art Culinaire and Wine Spectator. She is the author of Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography as well as several cookbooks.

Daria Lavelle is an American fiction writer. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and raised in the New York metro area, her work explores themes of identity and belonging through magic and the uncanny. Her short stories have appeared in The Deadlands, Dread Machine, and elsewhere, and she holds degrees in writing from Princeton University and Sarah Lawrence College.

This event is presented by the Princeton Public Library.