Thanks for the review copy. I also bought a copy from Book of the Month. I think I will be donating my copy to a little free library. The writing is great and I’m glad she finally got sober but at times it was hard to press on with reading about how she was high and/or drunk again.

I struggled with my own reason for reading memoirs while reading this one. I stand by the fact that listening to people's stories is crucial, especially for building empathy. When this book started, I immediately dislike the author. That, unfortunately, did not change as I kept reading. I persisted even though I seriously considered DNFing, hoping something in the narrative would turn a corner and also because I hoped to build my own ability to extend empathy. I really tried. Unfortunately, the entire memoir persisted in navel-gazing and also focused far more on her romantic struggles, addiction issues, and writing than the care and feeding centered in the title and focused on in the synopsis.

What a waste of time on this one. The author, Laurie Woolever is an alcoholic who drinks until passing out, smokes a lot of weed, cheats on her husband with every stranger she can find, pees herself and vomits in her purse. These are her good qualities.
I don’t think everyone is cutout to or should publish their memoir.
Thank you NetGalley and Ecco for my ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

Interesting behind the scenes look at Laurie's life in culinary life. From restaurants working for top name chefs, to being an assistant to another famous chef, she shows how you can excel while falling apart at the seems. A cautionary tale of excess and redemption, I enjoyed this, and am glad that the memoir ended on a more upbeat note.

Thank you Netgalley and Ecco for the ARC!

A raw, honest, lovely memoir written by Laurie Woolever who found her way to culinary school and then working for Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain. I was particularly moved by the openness and self-realization - the good, the bad, and the ugly. The writing is top notch and I stayed up way too late turning pages. While the parts that included Batali and Bourdain were interesting (understatement), the author's own story is what inspired me. She has done the work (if that makes sense) and we get to be part of it. At the last page, I wanted more. What happened next? A great memoir. Thanks to the publisher for the advanced copy.

This is a really interesting memoir for anyone who likes the Food Network or restaurant industry. I have to admit that I initially read for the Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain tidbits but ended up enjoying the rest just as much.

While I have never followed famous chefs or foodies like Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali, I was immediately swept up in Laurie Woolever’s memoir detailing her life and its intersections with these larger than life men.

Laurie is brutally, painfully honest about her highs and lows (mostly the lows), detailing for readers her tender underbelly of guilt and regrettable acts. And yet, for me, it felt raw, vulnerable and relatable. I can imagine some readers might find Laurie’s well-documented shame as playing victim where she’s the felon, but while I think that in reflection, it never felt that way when reading. Instead, I felt like I was watching a major accident unfold in real time, while somehow convinced Laurie would come out the other side without permanent injured (but maybe not unscathed).

I was intrigued by Laurie’s life in famous kitchens, the stories about Batali (mostly revolting) and Bourdain (mostly endearing), and loved her voice. Care and Feeding covers a lot of ground, years and years of Laurie’s life, in a seamless way. I really enjoyed it and imagine this will be among the popular memoirs of 2025. Highly recommended. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Some favorite quotes:

“Rich hippie boys tended to like girls who didn’t need to work at all,”

“According to my mother, his pious suffering had always been the prevailing family weather.”

“The fitness cult wasn’t really a cult, it was a pyramid scheme built on expensive protein powder smoothies, harsh calorie restriction, and the extremely renewable resource of women’s body anxiety.”

Laurie Woolever has definitely led an interesting, varied, and complicated life, and this memoir reflects the uneasy journey to career and personal stability she's taken. I think that readers who go into this book considering it more as an addiction memoir than a foodie memoir (which I think is kind of the opposite of how it's being marketed) will be more sympathetic to the story, and reframing it this way helped me as I struggled with some of her choices. I was fascinated by her experiences in the food world, and horrified by some of them (one of her famous former bosses definitely got away with his bad behavior, and probably worse than we know, for way too long).

What a fantastic book! The first one I have read by this author but definitely can't wait to read more! The characters stay with you long after you finish the book. Highly recommend!

This book is a memoir about Laurie Woolever's adult life. It's bookended, as you've probably heard, her work with Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain. The book is about her lived experience, mistakes, wins, growth, and smallness. If you want this book to center the men she. worked for and explain their behavior, you're going to be disappointed.

To me, her personal story, and the discomfort many readers seem to have with it. is actually much more interesting.

I think it's important to talk about Woolever's overall arc and behavior separately from the way that she addresses working for Mario Batali, now a known workplace predator and serial harasser.

About Batali- She unflinchingly relates her lack of action and, in some cases joining in, as Mario Batali revoltingly turns her work environment into a sexually charged cess pool. Some reviewers have said that this means that she is a bad person. I'd argue that it is an act of bravery to be honest about ways in which you've failed.

While she was working for Batali, she was a victim of his abuse herself and was not in a position to speak up without great professional risk to herself. Other women going through worse things does not discount her horrendous-sounding experience. After she no longer works for him, she stays silent because she is trying to move forward with her life, and because she's worried that she will lose her livelihood by speaking up against such a powerful person.

I've been a whistleblower in a less networked industry than Woolever's, and even with protections in place, it's terrifying. Years later I find myself wondering whether people I come across in other professional contexts knew that history. I constantly worry about a backchannel reference going to a person who was involved ruining my opportunity for a dream job. It's brave for a victim to speak up against terrible behavior, it's also understandable when they prioritize other things to protect themselves and continue building a career in a misogynistic industry.

About her story overall--This is a nonfiction account of a woman making decisions based on her own needs and desires. Some of them are very selfish and destructive toward other people. It's not a spoiler to say that over the course of the book she reflects and changes her approach in some areas, but also stands by many of her decisions in a way that may make some people uncomfortable. She details relationships, aborted job opportunities, benders, trauma she experienced, trauma that others experienced while she stood by, ambivalence about her role as a wife and mother, and a lot of great meals.

Reading this book reminded me of a lot of "bad boy" memoirs that glorify male chefs (and male celebrities of other kinds) who live fast and hard, betray their partners, sleep around and overindulge. Indeed, Bourdain, who has been all but canonized after his death, has produced many such artifacts. I've already seen some people (ok, all men) who are uncomfortable about this and seem to say that as a result her story is not worth telling.. I've never known moral perfection to be a requirement for a memoir written by a man, so it's interesting that when we find a woman who was in many ways a victim of this system we use that argument to devalue her experience.

This book reminded me of Miranda July's novel All Fours, which was a critical darling last summer. All Fours is about a woman who leaves her family to do a lot of self-indulgent and in some case damaging things, without any kind of professional obligation to do so. That book celebrates her consequence-free journey, even referencing an underage male character being sexually groomed and. raped by an older woman without acknowledging that this is what he's describing. Was this more comfortable for reviewers because it's ostensibly fictional? Because the reviewers were from the literature section and not the food and wine section of their publication? Because Woolever is still living her life and ending in a place where there's more story to come?

Woolever tells her story effectively and unapolegitically. Woolever is glutenous, lustful, irresponsible and out of control. She is a mother but her identity and role within the book is not "mother." While she has empathy for the people she hurt with her behavior, she also has empathy for herself through this journey. Without ever saying it explicitly the male chef-children are a foil for her arc, which includes a great deal more self reflection than we're used to seeing from them. Perhaps it's the reflection itself that makes these readers so uncomfortable. Reading her story can make you feel a little bit tired, a little bit overstuffed and almost hungover. That's what makes it effective.

The critical fascination with the men she writes about makes me wonder if those reviewers were looking for the book to be more about them than her. Ultimately, Woolever is a woman who has spent her career on the sidelines of powerful men. She can provide insights but she is not going to be able to solve the questions about why they've done what they did. She's not Anthony Bourdain. She's already written his story and this is her opportunity to tell hers.

Laurie Woolever's story would be worth telling even if she hadn't rubbed elbows with the famous men who are getting this book headlines right now. I'm glad that I read it and would recommend that readers who have a problem Woolever's being an admittedly flawed person consider at their own glass house before they start throwing stones.

Thank you to Ecco and NetGalley for giving me an advance copy of this book for an unbiased review.

4.5 stars rounded up. This book is a raw, gritty look at one woman’s life and path of self destruction as she worked for two of the most powerful and troubled chefs of the last twenty years. I really appreciated author Laurie Woolever’s unflinching self reflection and honesty when it came to her own flaws and problems. I thought I’d be more interested in her insight into Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain, but her own story is compelling in its own right, due in large part to her commitment to fully pulling back the curtain.

The Batali and Bourdain sections will certainly be of interest to long-time foodies and food TV addicts. The chapters surrounding Tony’s death were of course equal parts brutal and heartbreaking, but handled with care.

My only wish was that there were a few more chapters covering the last couple years of her life. The ending felt abrupt, and although it is a real life story still being lived and not a novel with a neatly wrapped-up ending, I wish I could have gained more insight into her current situation. Did her ex-husband ever forgive her? Did she ever give a real try at emotional sobriety? What was it like trying to finish Tony’s last book without him?

But overall, an excellent read. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the restaurant industry.

Thank you to Harper Collins and NetGalley for providing this ARC in exchange my honest opinions.

A remarkably tender, laugh out loud, self-scathing ride of a novel. This book was an absolute joy to read... deeply self reflective, hilarious, and a bona fide love letter to the service and food industry (for all of its good and all of its bad). The radical honesty with which Woolever writes is nearly eyewatering, so taboo that it makes you wince, laugh, and shake your head... but also very relatable and very nostalgiac in its own way. For someone who doesn't typically gravitate towards nonfiction novels, this book read like a contemporary fiction story, made all the more special by the fact that every single encounter and memory in it is real. If you are a person who loves food, or who once worked in the service industry, or was ever a messy ass 22 year old... you NEED to read this book.

Unfortunately, Care and Feeding didn’t quite live up to my expectations, or maybe my expectations were just too high. A memoir from someone who worked at revered restaurants and food publications, and served as an assistant to both Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain? I was intrigued. While it had its funny and interesting moments, I mostly found myself skimming, eager to reach the end. I think this will resonate with some readers, but it just wasn’t for me. I wanted more food and less… life. 🤷‍♀️

If you are a fan of memoir and food writing, this is going to be a huge hit. I love reading someone elses story through the lens of food. I could smell, taste, feel every chapter completely.

Laurie Woolever is an interesting writer for a lot of reasons, not least because of her connection to truly famous people. Despite this, she is thoughtful and frequently incisive. She does not pull punches for Mario or Tony, who has become posthumously lionized. She is critical of herself, but not maudlin. It’s an addiction memoir, but it’s so much more than that.

This book was fascinating and offered valuable insights into working in a high-stakes industry under influential employers. I found it informative.

Tough memoir from Laurie Woolever, as she recalls years of self-destructive addiction and behavior. Somehow, she manages high pressure jobs for celebrity chefs, a shell of a marriage to a husband that doesn’t seem to mind her excessive drinking, smoking, and dysfunctionality, and responsibilities to her son. As much as her story and life seem to revolve around alcohol and pot, she also makes sobriety seem a little too easy, giving up years of daily pot smoking only after she is told that she should quit to save money on a life insurance policy. It doesn’t seem there’s lessons learned or better life choices towards the end, rather a just a new-found absence of drugs and booze.

An absolutely open raw very entertaining memoir a book I enjoyed from first to last page.Laurie Woolever spares herself nothing shares her faults her mistakes her writing voice is so entertaining her discussing various situations she manages to get herself into describing her chaotic life decisions her love life.Working with at that time iconic chefs Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain these incredibly well known chefs at the height of their popularity was a peak into their world an insiders intimate view.Second book I’ve read by this author she’s a true pleasure to spend time with.#netgalley#eccobooks

I've been an admirer of Laurie Woolever's work for a long time and it's a real thrill to see her claim her own extremely compelling narrative separate from the powerful men she worked for. Women aren't always given the cultural freedom to reveal ourselves as messy and complicated in the same way that men are — but that doesn't mean we're not that way. In this memoir, Woolever unflinchingly owns her actions and impulses and consequences without self-pitying or glamorizing them, and she absolutely roars on the page. Sure, you may come for the Bourdain and Batali of it all (and there's plenty), but it's in her own story that you'll be sated.

I found this memoir to be fascinating, compulsively readable, and fairly introspective. The writing style was engaging and I kept wanting to read the next chapter. I also found the protagonist likeable and was rooting for her even when she was making clearly terrible choices (as she acknowledged throughout). That said, I wished that there was less of a focus on her escapades and more of a focus on her internal experience -- I found those sections more interesting overall.