When There Is No Recovery: Remembering Anthony Bourdain

T wo years ago Anthony Bourdain, the star talent of CNN’s Parts Unknown, was found dead, having hanged himself from the doorknob of his luxury hotel room. I remember the news coming across my laptop and in news alerts on my telephone, while I was sitting in a library working on a manuscript. A presumptuous feeling welled up inside me, a kind of anger that was totally unjustified. I drove out to a Dunkin’ Donuts, and CNN was discussing it live. And the words just came out of me, “F*** you, Tony.”

I’m just a fan — a guy who read his books, put some of his recipes into our home’s regular rotation, spent a 30th birthday at the Park Avenue restaurant he made famous, and binge-watched his television show when my children were squirming infants. I suppose I felt as so many others did, that his suicide was a special blasphemy. How dare someone I envy that much kill himself! But, of course, we can envy people even as they are struggling with their own demons. In my ignorance, I may have wanted to trade lives with the Anthony Bourdain of television, but he, in full knowledge of what it’s like to inhabit his thin, angular skull, might have traded for my thick head sight unseen.

But envy wasn’t the source of that strange feeling of betrayal. Bourdain was more important to people who are important to me. A couple of close friends and family members who have struggled with drug addictions and alcohol dependencies, and the occasional suicidal urge, looked up to him, too. I’m talking about people who lost part of a decade working as a busboy in rundown Florida taco joints while rehabbing in a group home, the people who managed to put their lives together only in their late 20s, to the point where they almost don’t recognize the person they were one night when they were cradling a gun.

They loved Bourdain because he had turned recovery, burnout, cynicism, and a nose familiar with all the rancid smells in the underbelly of modern life into a life and persona that was utterly magnetic, generous, and worldly. Bourdain modeled generosity. Food was his entryway into history, sociology, and politics. His show’s politics were certainly on the progressive side. His episode about the United Kingdom in the days after it voted for Brexit was probably his most dour and uncharitable. But he would occasionally give the stage to the odd conservatives and reactionaries who passed by on his show. One thinks of the San Francisco judo instructor who praised gentrification for removing the “scum” from the city, or of the Piedmontese immigrant to Germany who nonetheless dreaded the wave of migrants and refugees coming to Europe in the wave of the Syrian civil war.

Bourdain was the best writer many of my friends had ever read. And he really could write. The pages-long description of eating the illicit Ortolan at the start of Medium Raw is masterly, switching expertly between tantalizing and repulsive descriptions of hot oozing fat and bones cracking and scratching the inside of a mouth. The same switch is at work in his first book, Kitchen Confidential, which made a lurid romance of a kitchen drudgery. With Bourdain, you wanted to see how the sausage was made.

It was these recovered addicts who were texting me in the hours after Bourdain’s death, checking in on me. I’d never had their kind of struggles, but their life had made them sensitive to the way these things reverberate into people and awaken something dark in them.

And of course it has awakened something dark in others. Boudain’s suicide has inspired conspiracy theories that are exotic. They come up if you follow hashtags on social media like #epsteindidntkillhimself. Bourdain betrayed the Clintons, by going after Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein and the ring of pedophiles who run the planet. For others, Bourdain was the spiritual victim of his recent ex-girlfriend, Asia Argento. He had lovingly filmed her in the Fellini style in his CNN show — he was smitten like a teenager — but she is a witch who hexed him. The wizened family man of his final cookbook, Appetites, was thrown back into torpor by the evil eye.

I don’t think any of that is true exactly. I suspect it’s just hard to get older just when you start learning how to live. It’s hard to be jilted late in life, and it’s hard to carry around the responsibilities of a giant crew of people, and big TV contracts, and fame itself. It’s hard to be envied when you are suddenly blown back by an unnamable misery.

All I know is that for two years I haven’t been able to bring myself to rewatch any episodes of his show, one of the only things I liked on broadcast television. I can’t bear the idea of listening to one of his end-of-episode monologues, when he tries to snatch some wisdom from the world. I worry that his model of curiosity and generosity is disappearing from the world when we need it.