DO GIRLS MISS ANTHONY BOURDAIN?
happy birthday, tony xoxo
CW: suicide, suicidal ideation, addiction
A few years ago in early June—although the heat made it feel more like early apocalypse—I woke sweating as sunlight poured through my gauzy, tattered curtains. I was living in an apartment in Brooklyn without much furniture (so certainly without any air conditioning). Already, I was miserable. I rolled over with a groan to turn off the alarm on my phone and groggily tap open my emails, as I did every morning.
Eyes half-closed, muscle memory scrolled my inbox. Almost right past the email from my editor with the subject line: “TODAY.”
I sat up and wiped sweat from the back of my neck. She never sent me emails first thing in the morning. I opened the message.
“I’m sure you’ve seen the news,” it started. “Could you write something up? Will publish ASAP.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. What news?
I searched online for something, anything.
Until, eventually, the headline found me: Anthony Bourdain dead. Apparent suicide.
Sweating over my laptop, I rubbed my face with my hands. How? Just a few weeks earlier, we’d sat together in a dark restaurant.
I tried to write the news but the words wouldn’t come out.
What I needed was a smoke, I decided. So I took my laptop and went to the patio of the coffee shop on my corner. That time of day, the only seating was in the sweltering sun. When I checked my phone for the time, I discovered it had overheated and died. I sat, sweating and chain smoking Marlboro Reds and tapping at the keyboard with what I hoped would convey something, anything about what Bourdain had meant to me and millions of others.
I kept a lit cigarette tucked between my lips as I typed so if anyone saw me I could say that I wasn’t crying; my eyes were just filling with smoke.
*****
When people asked how I became a travel writer, I’d usually smile and shrug with something like, “Oh, I just kinda fell into it.” But the real answer was: I wanted to be Anthony Bourdain.
Watching his show, “No Reservations,” as a teenager, I was instantly enamored. He was cool. And smart. And funny. He knew about books. And movies. And music. He was a rock star in a foreign correspondent’s body—or was it a foreign correspondent in a rock star’s body? After watching him, I knew exactly the type of adult I wanted to be: one who, like Anthony Bourdain, wasn’t like other adults. I wanted to swear like Bourdain. I wanted to live like him. And fucking Christ, did I.
Within a few years of graduating college, I was traveling to places like Vietnam, Paris, Mexico City. I was eating Michelin-starred meals—three stars!—and writing about them. Not only that, I was getting paid for that writing. A few months before Bourdain’s death, when I’d been a travel writer for a couple of years, I had traveled to Montreal, Morocco, and Puerto Rico within three weeks. It was the unhappiest I had ever been.
I was 24 years old when he died and though I was getting sent on trips around the world, my personal life looked quite different. All my money seemed to disappear in nights out, so I couldn’t afford an AC unit for my bedroom. I woke up most mornings hungover.
After I filed the story at the coffee shop up the street, I returned to my apartment. As soon as the door shut behind me, I dropped all my belongings and collapsed onto the floor in a ball of tears. My roommate came out of her room and rushed over to hug me. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Bourdain,” I sputtered—well aware that I shouldn’t be sobbing over a man I had only spoken to twice. How melodramatic could I get? I didn’t even know the guy.
She put her arm around me, puzzled. Throughout our friendship, I’d had the reputation of being the stoic one. “It’s always so confusing when people do something like that,” she said, trying her best to console me.
“I’m not crying because I’m confused,” I straightened up and wiped tears from my eyes with the heels of my hands. “I’m crying because I understand it. I understand it completely. And I’m scared.”
It was the truth. A few months before—with my head over a toilet in Morocco after eating unwashed fruit—I had come up with a plan to kill myself. It wasn’t about the fruit. It was about the fact that I was living out my dreams and I couldn’t feel anything. Life was meaningless and I saw only one way out. I was going to get a gun. I wasn’t going to leave a note.
With Bourdain’s suicide, the reality of this plan finally hit me.
******
More than five years after Anthony Bourdain’s death, we’re still talking about him. On the internet, this meme keeps popping up:
Girls don’t miss their ex, they miss Anthony Bourdain.
Friends keep sending it to me and I cringe every time I see it. Is it true that I miss Anthony Bourdain?
For years after his death, I received emails from people who didn’t know how to use the internet. “LEAVE HIS FAMILY ALONE!!!!!!” they all said.
Thanks to the algorithm or whatever, these people had only just discovered the articles I had written on Bourdain when he was still alive.
The website I wrote for commissioned me to write at least one Bourdain article per month. They published these quick-hit articles because people always clicked on Bourdain headlines. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to know what he had to say—about Trump, about airport security, about cocktails. So I was often assigned stories like: write about what Bourdain said in this interview, write about what he tweeted, write about what he wore on vacation or who he got drinks with or…
The sorts of articles that would seem distasteful after a man died seemed like a normal part of the news cycle when he was alive.
After enough of these articles, I’d become the website’s resident Bourdain reporter. And when his PR saw enough of these articles, they offered me an interview with Bourdain.
It was over the phone while he was in West Virginia. I was shaking at my kitchen table as I dialed the number his publicist had emailed me. When the hotel’s front desk picked up, I collected myself and repeated the room number I’d been given. They patched me through.
“Hello?” a deep voice answered.
“Is this Anthony Bourdain!?” I practically shouted.
“Yes..?” he answered tentatively. God, I wished I’d made a cooler entry. My voice was so bubbly and unserious. He sounded tired. He stopped to pour himself coffee.
Eventually, we settled into the interview. My editor had given me a list of questions to ask—packing tips, his favorite foods, favorite vacations. She knew the sorts of things that people wanted to read about. Bourdain answered politely and comically but half-heartedly. As if he were a musician on a reunion tour, playing the Greatest Hits he’d long since stopped caring about.
I asked him about West Virginia. What was it like there? His voice changed. It became both more thoughtful and more animated. He told me that he’d sat down with war criminals around the world and shared meals with people he vehemently disagreed with. Why couldn’t he do the same at home? He was learning the complexity of West Virginians—despite their reputation as the land of “Trump, guns, and football.” He told me about their long-standing (and justified) distrust of the government. He told me how he understood America better by being there.
After about a half hour, I hung up the phone, convinced that whoever said “don’t meet your heroes” must have had some shitty heroes.
*****
Lots of people loved Anthony Bourdain but I think his most ardent fans were fellow addicts. Bourdain wrote openly about his heroin use and his early debauchery. He often said he was stunned he was still alive.
At that point, I’d been suicidal—on and off—for years. The sort of suicidal that masked as a hard-drinking, hard-partying lifestyle. People who only saw me at night would call me things like “free-spirited.” But it’s easy to be free-spirited when you don’t care if you live or if you die. In New York, I went to clubs on a mission to erase my mind. I would go anywhere with anyone because I didn’t care if I made it back home. (Somehow, luckily, I always did.)
And when I was on the road, this lifestyle manifested as “Bourdain style.” That meant, namely, binge-drinking on press trips but it also meant getting on the backs of strangers’ motorcycles in foreign countries and walking deep into medinas alone, hoping I’d find some Burroughs shit. (All I got was lost.)
Bourdain burned bright—which encouraged me to burn brighter. What I didn’t know was that a burning person must always be burning something. Every fire needs some fuel.
I didn’t realize it until I started travel writing but tourism is a lot like addiction—it works until it doesn’t. Addicts rely on their substance of choice until, eventually, their lives become untenable. Growing cities rely on tourism until, eventually, they become overtouristed.
As I visited places I’d visited before, I saw how they were changing. The streets were more crowded. Residents were being pushed out for Airbnbs. Delis had become trinket shops.
There’s a phenomenon called “shifting baseline syndrome” that aims to explain how environments change—and why people often don’t realize how drastic the changes have become. We understand a location based on how we first saw it, not realizing that Manhattan used to be a forest. Each generation redefines what is “natural.” We forget that before places were tourist attractions, they were just places.
That’s how the rhetoric of “everyone should visit Venice at least once” was turning Venice into more of a tourist attraction than a city. Machu Picchu was literally crumbling from foot traffic.
Something inside me was crumbling, too. While fighting off thoughts about wrapping my lips around the barrel of a gun, I couldn’t seem to work up enthusiasm for anything. That great bowl of pho near Washington Square Park? I’d had better in Hanoi. The view from my acquaintance's apartment? Meh. I’d seen more impressive in Dubai. I was learning that a life of adventure doesn’t bring happiness—it simply tests your sense of wonder.
I began to think that shifting baseline effect might work for addicts, too. When we meet a person in the throes of active addiction, we consider it their personality instead of a coping mechanism. We don’t think about the thing that is fueling their fire— or the maladaptive patterns that are handed off like some great generational relay race.
I used to ask myself: was I drawn to Bourdain because I wanted to party my way through depression or did I party my way through depression because I had seen Bourdain? If I ever figured out the answer to this question, I’m not sure that it would have done me any good. I kept traveling after he died because the only responses to life I knew were: fight, flight, or get fucked up—and I knew which option was the most fun.
Perhaps girls don’t miss Anthony Bourdain. They miss how they once dealt with their pain.
*****
Less than two months before he died, I waited for Bourdain at a German restaurant on the Upper West Side. On the subway ride over, I listened to guided meditations trying to calm myself down.
I arrived before him, which was rare, his publicist told me. “Tony is almost always early,” she said. I sat in the dark and empty restaurant when the heavy, wooden door swung open and a large man—6’4”—strode in. I had never seen anybody actually walk into a room like a cowboy. He said, “Hello,” in a voice so deep and gravelly, it was almost cartoon. He talked to his publicist and other members of his team, then settled into the booth across from me.
He was kind albeit distracted and uncomfortable. But that was fair. He was at the restaurant to film—he had work to do that day—and I think the only people who are fully comfortable with journalists are almost always narcissists.
I had decided I would ask him all the questions I wanted to ask last time. I wanted to know how this man thought, not what he packed for a weekend trip. With my phone recording, I asked how he picked the music for his show. I asked about his film influences. I asked about politics. He came most alive when he was talking about other people’s work—Wong Kar-Wai, Bernardo Bertolucci, Christopher Doyle—but it was talking about music that really seemed to animate him. I nodded along—knowing his references mainly because he’d written or talked about them in episodes, articles, or on Twitter.
“Finally!” he smacked his palms against the wooden table. “Someone who gets it!”
If it were possible to frame one moment of your life and keep it forever, this is the one I’d pick: to be branded by my teenage hero as “someone who gets it.” At the time, I interpreted this as the pinnacle of my life. (My hero approved of me!) It didn’t enter my mind that perhaps what he approved was the way I had followed his path.
We wrapped up the interview and he smiled and shook my hand. He said he was looking forward to reading my piece. I was still dazed when his publicist came up and said Tony seemed to like me. Would I want to spend a day on set sometime soon?
*****
There are many, many episodes of “Parts Unknown” that people may point to as their favorites. The one where he eats pho with Barack Obama in Hanoi. The one where he has to flee Lebanon as war breaks out.
Personally, I always return to the Miami episode when he gets lunch with Iggy Pop, aired just three years before Bourdain died.
Iggy Pop was his hero. In an interview about the episode, Bourdain says of Iggy: “His music was incredibly important to me from early on. Responsible for—in many ways—many of the things that went wrong in my life.”
But when he gets to Miami, Bourdain finds a healthy Pop. At lunch, they share one glass of white wine each. Iggy orders the shrimp.
You get the sense that Bourdain has come to this interview as a pilgrim comes to their guru on top of a mountain. The duo sits near a window with Venetian blinds. The sun is shining.
“As far as looking after my health,” Bourdain starts, grinning, “your music early on was a negative example.”
“I hear you,” Iggy Pop looks down and smiles.
“And looking at my own life and career, I’m pretty much known for traveling around the world and recklessly drinking and eating to excess.” He’s incredibly animated as he speaks. “What does it say about us that we are now sitting in a healthy restaurant—I just came from the gym—and we’re in Florida?”
Iggy Pop seems to take a minute, like he’s been asking himself this same question lately. But he’s not tortured about it. His eyes are clear and blue and he looks directly at Bourdain.
“Listen, if you just flame out, you’re in such voluminous and undistinguished company. And then all your works will flame out quicker with you.”
Eerily, the YouTube clip of this interview freezes at this moment. You never see Bourdain’s reaction to his hero’s proclamation.
But if you keep watching the episode, there are a few clues about how Bourdain may have felt.
“You’re the template for the rockstar,” Bourdain continues. “Other rock stars look to you to figure out ‘How should I behave?’ [...] Given that, what thrills you?”
“The nicest stuff right now, it’s really embarrassing,” Iggy replies, smiling and serene. “It’s being loved and actually appreciating the people that are giving that to me.”
And is it just me—or does Bourdain’s face fall?
*****
Bourdain’s death didn’t make me leave travel journalism. The pandemic did. But I can’t help but think of the death of my hero as the beginning of the end for me. If this man couldn’t find meaning in what he was doing—if he couldn’t outrun his demons in Hong Kong or France or Buenos Aires—what chance did I have?
A few months after his death, I started going to therapy. I stopped binge drinking. When the pandemic hit, I stopped traveling. Then the work stopped coming in. During that time, I transitioned to writing about other things. Staying at home and editing. Taking long walks. Becoming excited about the people in my life and how they loved me.
I do not hold Bourdain responsible for the culture he inherited. I do not blame the man for decades (hell, centuries) of a culture that repeated—sincerely, and with conviction—that it was better to burn out than to fade away.
Mimicry is human. I exist in a long line of copycats. Bourdain was just a single point in the constellation of pained people—and you can’t blame the North Star for shining brightest for you.
Still, I often find myself wondering what would happen if we could talk again. If I could somehow have a third conversation with Anthony Bourdain, I would ask how it felt to meet his hero. I would ask the same questions he asked Iggy Pop—given that you’re the template for the rockstar, what thrills you? I wonder how he would respond. I wonder if my face would fall.
this was a beautiful read, thank you
this is so amazing ❤️ wow. thank you for sharing!