“I was having a hard time on that trip because I didn’t understand the point of Tokyo without drinking,” she tells me over a video call from her home in Queens, New York, in February of this year, ahead of the release of her new book. “Acting out sexually was a way to escape that.” She takes a reflective pause. “I’m a different person now, you know, just trying to decentre myself. As much as I thought I was a worthless piece of shit, I also thought I was the centre of the universe. I think that’s a common thing in addiction.”
Care and Feeding is a blisteringly candid and laugh-out-loud account of hedonism and heartbreak. It chronicles Woolever’s two decades as a food writer, editor, chef and assistant to two of the USA’s most notorious chefs – Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain – men whose own challenges with addictive behaviour at times seemed to mirror her own. “Very few people are curious about the unknown women who prop up the work of important men,” Woolever writes, as she sets out her own chaotic journey of misadventures while working in their shadows. It’s common practice for prominent celebrity chefs on both sides of the Atlantic to heavily lean on the work of others when releasing books under their names. “Without the Tonys or Marios of the world, there would have been no book, or TV show or magazine work for me,” she writes. “The flip side of this, that the end products, credited solely to the marquee men, wouldn’t exist without the work of women like me.”
The Beatles remain the world’s favorite story, getting more beloved every year. Their friend Derek Taylor called them “the 20th century’s greatest romance,” but as it turns out, the 20th century was just the beginning.
"It's beautiful," says Corey Tarwater, an ecologist at the University of Wyoming in the US who began researching O'ahu's ecosystems in 2014. Sounds like the "cheww-chewww" song of the pale green warbling white-eye and the chattering, almost electrical call of the red-billed leiothrix surround you. "There's really neat lizards around," adds Tarwater. "There's these highly structured forests with these amazing tropical plant species."
For hikers setting out on O'ahu's mountain trails, these are thrilling wildernesses within easy reach of Hawaii's capital, Honolulu, says Tarwater. Yet nothing is quite as it might seem, she adds. "You wouldn't know unless you study them, but if you walk around any forest around Honolulu, there's not going to be one single native plant species there."
For nearly 20 years, I’ve been researching and writing about the human brain as a storyteller. My work has unalterably changed the way I see the human world in general, and myself in particular. It has helped me understand everything from political hatred and religions to cults to the nature of identity and suicidal thought. It has even made sense of my own lifelong struggle with making friends.