Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain by Charles Leerhsen

Review by Elizabeth Starkey

The introduction to Charles Leerhsen’s Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain concludes with a recap of one of those piquant Tony voice-overs, here in Kenya, that account for his broad appeal: “I was forty-three years old, dunking fries… I knew with absolute certainty that I would never see Rome, much less this.” When I originally watched that episode, I paused to write that down, Bourdain, as often remarked, serving a kind of secular saint to his fans (which, like all vaguely worldly geriatric millennials, I count myself among). There are, I think, very few fairweather Bourdain fans, which means anyone picking up this book is likely to have Thoughts and Opinions on what we all know is coming. The success of the narrative largely lies in how closely the reader’s views align with Leerhsen’s.

Part of the draw for avid readers of biography–myself included–is the bleak-but-comforting-in-its-predictablity knowledge of how the story is going to end. In Bourdain’s case, the denouement captured global media attention at the time and has been plumbed for various commercial and vanity related reasons since (Leerhsen quotes, for example, from In the Weeds: Around the World and Behind the Scenes with Anthony Bourdain, by Bourdain’s long-time director and producer Tom Vitale, throughout). The controversial 2021 documentary Roadrunner already cued up the villain, for those that may have somehow missed this in 2018, in the form of Bourdain’s erstwhile girlfriend/tormentor Asia Argento, and Leerhsen is ready to lean hard into this. Given the amount of existing material about Bourdain’s life and death, then, are devotees of the Bourdain oeuvre likely to learn anything new? The biggest lesson seems to be to be alert to hyperbole from Tony himself, who as a writer has made minor editorial tweaks to his past that don’t always agree with the record as it actually exists. 

The most illuminating section concerns Tony’s childhood. He was a troubled rebel, he told us repeatedly over the years. What, Leerhsen probes, was he rebelling against? As it turns out, a fairly average childhood: “the original sin of being born suburban.” This section also hints at several later interpersonal scuffles that, unfortunately, we never get more about–the tense relationships with his mother and brother, who disappear for the next two-thirds of the book, with his brother bafflingly reappearing in the final paragraph with a chip on his shoulder about not being made the replacement host of the weakest of Tony’s shows, The Layover (what?).

Leerhsen laments the way the memoir/biography industry forces their books to bow to the tyranny of chronology and takes arms against this in a few jarring ways. A recap of Tony’s college/culinary school years is suddenly interrupted by a half-sentence reminder that “…he would hit bottom on account of another woman who at the time now under discussion had not been born.” Later, a chapter ends with No Reservations being picked up, and the next begins with his marriage to his second wife a couple of years later–skipping over a few crucial details, like his divorce. As with his brother and mother, his first wife simply disappears. A strike against Big Biography, I suppose, but not a necessary one.

Particularly uninteresting are the attempts to contextualize Bourdain’s previous “un-wokeness,” which manifested in sins like calling someone “Italian” and expecting that to be a stand-in for their whole personality to his readers. Who cares? Political correctness isn’t why you like him, and if you’re just here to find things to dislike, his treatment of his staff, both in kitchens and on his shows, offers more compelling material by far. Not to mention that a book that contains the line “common sense tells us that cooking and music combine about as readily as cooking and hockey or hockey and existentialism or Spanish literature and your mama” should maybe not be casting the first stone in re: cringeyness. 

In the end, though, Down and Out gives you what you want: a quick hit of more Bourdain and a reminder–punk rock, fade to black–of life’s two greatest tragedies.