never kill yourself, there’s the risk of getting a horrific biography written about yourself, and that’s just not worth it.

i believe that to be a good person, you need to have both the capability (which everyone has) and the want to do so (which really just depends on the person). Charles Leerhsen (whom i will refrain from calling “Charlie” in this review, despite him solely calling Bourdain “Tony” in this book) absolutely has the capability, but is severely lacking in want. through writing this book, he has shown himself to be one of the most callous people alive, someone solely looking for cash, and a lazy writer, judging by how much Down and Out in Paradise cannibalizes Kitchen Confidential.

let’s get started.

The Best Place to Start

what are Leerhsen’s goals in writing this biography? let’s look at what he says in the prelude: “We actually can learn a lot from celebrities, who after all travel the furthest and the fastest in life and therefore accumulate the most edifying scrapes and bruises. A normal person’s scars speak strictly of his or her probably prosaic personal history; the celebrity’s, on the other hand, show what can and inevitably (and reassuringly) does go wrong even when one has money, beauty, and adulation in extravagant supply.” while i’m already not a fan of the tone (what does Leerhsen mean by “inevitably” here? i’m really hoping he’s not saying that Bourdain was “inevitably” going to commit suicide), there actually could be some interesting examinations of Bourdain’s shows and books, particularly when you’re creating an unauthorized biography and don’t have to write what his estate tells you to write. you could look at the contrast between how he talks about himself in his work vs. the love the people in his life had for him in works like Bourdain: the Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever, the contrast between being self-deprecating and labeling himself as a narcissist, the long-running streak of jokes about suicide (more on that later. lots more on that later)… there’s lots of options. and Leerhsen does make a point here in the prelude that i agree with: the inherent weirdness of the fact that dead celebrities can essentially be turned into brands. i won’t argue with him on that, but instead of “breaking the Bourdain myth”, as Leerhsen claims he wants to do, he has written a book filled to bursting with bad-faith interpretations and severe cherrypicking of a real man’s life.

Why Write a Biography of Someone You Dislike?

Leerhsen, throughout this book, seems to have an intense disdain for Bourdain himself. while that’s perfectly fine on its own, one person and their art won’t be for everybody, i don’t understand why you would write a biography about someone you dislike AND not even attempt to take this job you’ve given yourself seriously. here’s a short list of the various insults and snide comments he makes about Bourdain (believe me, there’s many more than just this): “Tony’s early fiction writing was not always this awful, and sometimes it was actually okay, but it seldom broke the plane of mediocre.” “If the pre-fame part of Tony’s life is a lesson in anything, it is a lesson in the pitfalls of persistence.” “When Anthony Bourdain awoke early on the morning of April 12, 1999, in his sixth-floor apartment on Riverside Drive and West 116th Street, he was every bit the flat-out American failure that his mother and father (by then twelve years dead) had always feared he would grow up to be” there’s so many more than this, there’s an insult on near every page, but this was as many as i could grab before my kindle began repeatedly crashing from how many bookmarks and highlights i have in this book.

The Kitchen Confidential of It All

much of this book (i’d say at least 35-40%) is a play-by-play recap of Bourdain’s first memoir, Kitchen Confidential, which is some truly extraordinary levels of padding. it’s also just plain messy writing and leaves very little time to cover, yknow, the rest of his life. which seems important, considering this is a biography? during these long sections of retelling the exact stories Bourdain wrote of, Down and Out in Paradise becomes dull in addition to bad. despite all the various complaints Leerhsen has about Bourdain’s books, Bourdain could tell an interesting story in a funny way, and Leerhsen is attempting to ride his coattails. here’s an example of a Kitchen Confidential story, retold in Down and Out in Paradise: “Tony’s audition was going poorly even before he stupidly barehanded a hot sauté pan filled with osso bucco Milanese and immediately dropped it to the pasta-covered floor. He then compounded his error by asking his boss, Tyrone, if there might be some burn cream and a Band-Aid in the vicinity.” this is the exact story told in KC, but in KC it’s a thousand times more entertaining, both because it’s written by Bourdain, AND because it’s written by him after enough life experience to know that this story makes him look silly. and he acknowledges that in KC! it makes him look ridiculous, and he tells it anyway! but in Down and Out in Paradise that perspective and surrounding frame of “i was ridiculous, and i know it” is ignored. Leerhsen just tells it, uses it to make Bourdain look silly, and moves on, never mentioning that Bourdain himself knew it was silly. and this leads me to…

Charles Leerhsen Needs to Start a Cherry Farm

he’s so good at cherrypicking, i think it’s time for a career shift! throughout the vast majority of Down and Out in Paradise, Leerhsen will cherrypick aspects of Bourdain’s work and life, seemingly to make him look bad or to (and i really hope this isn’t it, but it was the message i received) essentially push the idea that everything in Bourdain’s life led up to his suicide. while i do agree with Leerhsen’s critique of Kitchen Confidential’s usage of ethnicities to describe people Bourdain doesn’t mention the name of (it’s my least favorite aspect of KC, and like Leerhsen says, it ages the book tremendously), he talks about this while conveniently not mentioning Bourdain’s intense support of immigrant restaurant workers in the same book (a quote from KC: “No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American. the Ecuadorian, Mexican, Dominican, and Salvadorian cooks I’ve worked with over the years make most CIA-educated white boys looks like clumsy, sniveling little punks.”) he criticizes one quote from KC based on how Bourdain described the looks of some waitresses, but doesn’t mention how in the same book, Bourdain talks about how difficult it is to be a woman in the restaurant world, and his admiration for women who do it (another quote from KC: “I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some really studly women line cooks — no weak reeds these.” and: “I greatly admire tough women in busy kitchens.”). cherrypicking galore. there’s also Leerhsen’s habit of making extremely pessimistic conclusions about Bourdain. seemingly, to him, anything positive is an exaggeration or a lie, and anything negative must be true (even if it’s told to him by a source whom he knows has lied to him before). in Bourdain’s quote about ending his heroin use after having looked in the mirror and seen “Someone worth saving—or someone I at least wanted to try real hard to save” (quote from the Massachusetts episode of Parts Unknown), i see hope. Leerhsen sees dramatics and the idea that Bourdain thought he was too special to be an addict. jesus christ, that’s a terrible interpretation.

Suicidality this is the hardest section of this review for me to write. Leerhsen’s hardheartedness on this topic left me shaking with anger and sadness. it’s not difficult to find a lot of evidence of thoughts of suicide in Bourdain’s work. there is a post on r/anthonybourdain on Reddit that collects almost every mention (i say ‘almost’ because i can think of one that isn’t included, but still exists). reading through it is fucking heartbreaking. despite this fact of the man he is writing about, Leerhsen has some of the most horrifying callousness towards suicidality and addiction that i’ve ever seen. these many, many mentions of and jokes about suicide are brushed off in one sentence in the final chapter of Down and Out in Paradise: “And when things didn’t go so well, he frequently threatened to hang himself from the shower rod.” while this is, frankly, fucking egregious, it’s not even close to how badly Leerhsen treats this aspect of Bourdain’s life. the Caribbean chapter of Anthony Bourdain’s Medium Raw is a devastating one. in it, Bourdain recounts what happened in the aftermath of his first marriage ending, namely his repeated episodes of getting extremely drunk, driving dangerously fast on curving cliffside roads, and deciding at the last possible second whether to stay on the road or drive his car off the cliff and into the sea. in the book he describes these feelings as suicidal. man, this is a pretty serious topic, one i’d hope anyone could feel some empathy towards. let’s go see what Leerhsen thinks, he’s been pretty harsh so far but he must show some compassion here… “It was an odd, complicated, and, by at least one measure, curiously feminine way to approach self-destruction. Men, the experts tell us, tend to go for the simpler, irreversible methods of suicide like a bullet to the brain (or a noose around the neck), while women in their wisdom tend to prefer an approach that’s less reliable.” …i feel like Jiminy Cricket in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish discovering that yes, Big Jack Horner is truly a monster. Leerhsen then implies that, because the main character in one of Bourdain’s novels (Gone Bamboo, specifically) goes through a similar scenario, that this entire suicidal period may never have happened. christ on a bike, i hate this book. speaking from personal experience + the experiences of people i’ve read from online, it’s not unusual for someone suicidal to fixate on one specific method of dying. so to me, it’s really not implausible that Bourdain could write that into one of his books, then a few years later, be living the same scenario himself. judging by this and the fact (that Leerhsen shared himself in this book) that Bourdain shared this info with his second wife, i truly don’t doubt that it happened. and, just the icing on top of the worst cake ever created, Leerhsen talks about the exact method of Bourdain’s death. not even just the method, but exactly how to do it. obviously i’m not going to be sharing that here. thanks, though, Leerhsen! you’ve given my mind new ammunition for the next bad day i have. didn’t really need that, my brain is creative enough with the self-destruct button already.

next is a bit of a “greatest hits” of this book. you could consider this a list of dishonorable mentions, things that were shitty but not big enough to get their own sections of this review: -Leerhsen calls Bourdain woke for supporting the #MeToo movement -Leehrsen talks about gender in the same way my dad does, and trust me, you do NOT want to emulate my dad in discussions about gender -there’s so much criticism of Bourdain’s writing abilities that it becomes purely absurd -this Sigmund Freud-ass motherfucker really blames a lot on Bourdain’s mother -there is a constant implication that Bourdain killed himself over romance. i quote: “He would indeed always live for sad, beautiful, pitiful, brilliant, dramatic, so dramatic women—right up until the moment that he stopped living for them.” -right after the description of how Bourdain died, there is a joke about autoerotic asphyxiation and the assurance that no, his penis was not out when he died. fucking tasteless, man.

to end this review, i’m going to talk directly to the author for a moment.

Charles Leerhsen: the impression i have gotten of you through reading Down and Out in Paradise is of someone who would be perfectly happy to have been a fly on the wall, watching Anthony Bourdain die, if it only meant you would earn a few more luscious dollars through sharing all the gruesome, saddening details.

i don’t know how you sleep at night.

tldr/tw; White Savior

"Today when people talk about the history of Hopkin's relationship with the Black community, the story many of them hold up as the worst offense, is that of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose body, they say, was exploited by white scientists."

The information in this book about Henrietta herself and the historical use of HeLa cells is worth probably 4 stars. But that takes up about half of the book. The other half is the author, inserting herself into the story- describing how 'difficult' it was to track down Henrietta's family and how they didn't want to talk to her, because they didn't have good experiences talking with the media and the scientists. Skloot has a lot of white lady exceptionalism going on, because she thinks, OH, I'm so special. They'll talk to ME. And proceeded to call and call and call and call and call and pressure and call, and knock on doors, until they finally talk to her. This half of the book problematic enough that I think more attention needs to be brought to it.

John Hopkins didn't give us no information about anything...Idk if they didn't give us information because they was making money out of it, or if they was just wanting to keep us in the dark about it. I think they made money out of it because they was selling her cells all over the world and shipping them for dollars.

Hopkins say they gave them cells away, but they made millions. It's not fair. She's the most important person in the world, and her family living in poverty. If our mother's so important to science. Why can't we get health insurance?"

Just a few hundred pages into the book and I was curious as to how much the Lacks family receives from this biography. Especially since the author and the family have talked about how Henrietta and the Black community have been taken from while white doctors and institutions profited financially and with prestige. So of course, the author MUST give a set percentage of her earnings to the family right? It's only fair considering that the book literally would not exist without the family's participation.

.... Of course she didn't!!!! She did the bare minimum and gets her white saviour moment! Skloot established a foundation which she donates part of her profit to, but she's not transparent on how much, and how often. Plus other people can donate to it- so who knows, maybe she only stuck in the first couple thousand and has never touched it since. Meanwhile her book has been a huge success with TV deals and everything. Additionally, members of the Lacks family must APPLY for grants for things they want or need such as surgeries, dental care, etc. The funds are also available for others to apply. Are you KIDDING ME? What kind of racist bullshit is this that you take what you owe someone and lock it behind an APPLICATION. Oh, my mother just fell down the stairs. Hold on, I need to fill out this application and wait for them to get back to me before I can call an ambulance. It's very "bill gates refuses to give up vaccine patents to the global south so they can make their own vaccines at affordable rates, instead he makes them get western made expensive vaccines because RACISM and $$$$$." There's gotta be a word or phrase to describe this type of behaviour, but my brain is just mad and can't think properly.

Back to how she wrote the story- the way Skloot described the Lacks family, especially towards to end?? Take a Monopoly go to jail care because what the fuck was that and why was it relevant or necessary at all. I ended up not being able to finish the book after getting through 90% of it because the way she was writing about these REAL people without any consideration of their privacy or embarrassment? It made me feel disgusted.