.
It has been three years since the suicide death of chef-turned-writer-turned-TV-food-and-travel-star Anthony Bourdain. An outpouring of illuminating, incisive stories have flowed forth — from Laurie Woolever’s book Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography to Academy Award-winner Morgan Neville’s Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain. That there still remain fresh, mesmerizing insights about life with Bourdain is astonishing, as revealed in the compellingly intimate new memoir by Bourdain’s longtime producer and director, Tom Vitale. Published this month (Hachette Book Group), In the Weeds: Around the World and Behind the Scenes with Anthony Bourdain is a fast-flying, deep-diving, funny, loving, tender, joyful, painful, jolting, twisted, tumultuous and shockingly wild ride. Reader: Hold on tightly.
Bourdain and Vitale in Brazil.
For more than a decade, Vitale worked on nearly 100 episodes of Bourdain’s No Reservations, The Layover and CNN’s Parts Unknown, earning him five Emmy Awards. It was a unique, demanding, adrenaline-racing job that had Vitale juggling countless details, outsize personalities and eyebrow-raising challenges in a drive to develop masterful shows. Much of this was done while criss-crossing the globe for up to 250 days per year, sometimes to dangerous hotspots, such as Libya after the Revolution and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as to surreal sweet notes, such as Vietnam, where Bourdain and President Obama together ate white rice noodles, greens, fried pork rolls, steaming bowls of broth and drank beers, sitting on plastic chairs at a table in a small café.
.
Vitale’s relationship with Bourdain, a beloved yet very complicated man, fuels this engrossing travelogue’s engine. Bourdain’s untimely demise — in June 2018 as the crew prepared for an episode in France — rattled and depressed Vitale. “Whatever the hell I did for a living was so vivid and spectacular. It all but consumed me,” wrote Vitale. “Then, without warning, it was over forever.... What follows is my best attempt to paint an honest picture of my experience traveling with Tony, the highs and lows, and the bizarre as shit situations in which we constantly found ourselves.”
Details upon details unfurl, layer and build spell-binding and sometimes scary descriptions of TV-making goings-on of which viewers are mostly unaware. Plus, 85 on-location photos are included. Spotlit are a sumptuous array of destinations, such as Argentina, Bhutan, Brazil, Burma, Denmark, France, Greece, Indonesia, Italy, Jamaica, Laos, Malaysia, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey and the United States.
With President Obama in Hanoi, Vietnam.
“It has been said Tony used food as a passport, and we did,” wrote Vitale. “Food was a fantastic device, our way into a culture. Sharing a meal put people at ease, helped them forget the cameras were there, and inspired them to open up about their lives. Most importantly, food had become our cover, at least as far as I was concerned.... If it wasn’t for the cover of a ‘food show,’ we never would have been able to get to the places we did. Season after season while planning the shoots, food had morphed from the show’s raison d’etre to almost an afterthought. By the end, it was a show about people far more often than one about food.”
Jeeps were marked "T.V." to identify Bourdain's crew as journalists while filming in conflict zones.
In the Weeds explores the tightrope of personal and professional longings and expectations; the complexities of borders and the people within them; the ache for mutual trust and the ache of distrust; the multiple meanings of home and family and friendship; the allure and intensity of lust and seduction. And Bourdain’s love affair with Asia Argento.
“As the show got bigger, everything else in Tony’s life got bigger too,” Vitale wrote. “His fame, the stakes, the problems, the phobias, all grew at an exponential pace. In hindsight it’s clear how Tony had become more and more isolated and lonely, and more dependent on his relationship with Asia Argento. They’d been on-again, off-again for the two years before his death. She wasn’t only beautiful, fascinating and exhilarating. Being famous, Asia understood Tony’s lifestyle, but the relationship was far from a honeymoon.”
Many months after Bourdain’s passing, Vitale met again with Argento during a late afternoon when the dining room of an upscale restaurant in a northern suburb of Rome was quieted. “I declined food and asked for a bottle of Talisker,” he wrote, gearing himself up for a pivotal conversation. It was.
Vitale on the Skrang River, in Borneo, Malaysia.
Bourdain also had an obsession with death, referring to, joking about and musing aloud over it fairly regularly. At the time, it wasn’t taken seriously. In retrospect, Vitale wonders whether he could have done more to change Bourdain’s final trajectory.
Bourdain’s fans will find plenty to savor, think about and discuss. This is Vitale’s memoir, his singular account. Stones are lifted. Curtains are pushed back. An engaging narrative is woven. Vitale opens his heart and veins to create powerful, poignant, passionate prose. A page-turner, indeed.
