I don’t need an agenda / I just tell the truth / let it off the leash and don’t touch it / it knows what to do.

— Dessa, “5 out of 6”

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I don’t need to tell you who Anthony Bourdain was. Here’s the bullet points version, anyway: he was a writer, veteran chef and TV host whose books and shows made a lot of us hungry, a little less fearful, a little more curious (here’s where the phrase “bad-boy chef” or somewhat nonsensical comparison — “part Alain Ducasse, part Hunter Thompson” or whatever — would go if I wanted to use them, which I don’t).

Dessa is a musician and essayist from Minnesota whose music I can best describe as, like, melancholy rap bangers: just off the top of my head, I can think of songs that reference St. Sebastian, Thomas Aquinas, and non-Euclidian geometry. Her most recent album, Chime, and book of essays, My Own Devices, are concerned in part with the neuroscience of romantic love.

Personally, I don’t have a lot in common with either of them: to slightly mangle a Dessa lyric, I’m 5’2” in my highest kicks. Good whiskey is wasted on me, given that I’ll just pour a Coke in it. I won a city spelling bee at the age of eight and, really, it’s all been downhill since then. I’m probably closer in temperament to an especially nervous corgi than anything else.

These are unexpected connections, is what I’m saying.

*

I didn’t read Kitchen Confidential until after Tony died. Dessa posted a photo of it to her Instagram sometime in July: the original cover, chef’s whites, earring. Silver ring on her index finger, what looks like a subway platform in the background. Book club, she said: read up to a certain point, and we’d convene on her Facebook page in a couple of weeks to discuss it. Having been meaning to read it anyway and figuring the deadline would help, I went out and picked up a copy. I didn’t know much about him other than the bullet points (rock-star chef, crass don’t-give-a-fuck persona, all of that) which might have turned me off, otherwise.

The second edition of the book opens on a list in Tony’s own handwriting: crab bee hoon, rognons de veau Bercy, mac + cheese (NO fucking truffle oil!). Baguette + butter. Salt. GOOD SHIT. Finally, I thought. Representation for those of us who love cheese and think too fast to have good handwriting. I feel seen. So, because I’m one of those annoying people who’s incapable of liking things a normal amount, I never really had a chance. I fell in love then and there and I could tell this was gonna be one of those things I fell headfirst into and wouldn’t shut the fuck up about for the next six months at least. I watched every show he ever made by the end of 2018. Apart from Kitchen Confidential I have five of his other books (and another two on the way, at the time of this writing). I got the Les Halles Cookbook for my birthday in December, which is gorgeous: huge and heavy even for a restaurant cookbook, with an impressive breadth of information packed into it. Mine’s still pretty pristine, the pages just crying out for a little demi-glace to be spilled on them.

It’s his other cookbook I want to talk about, though. I spent a lot of last year, the summer in particular, trying to get professional treatment for my disordered eating, a decade’s worth of anxiety and bad habits around food, and just the general concept of existing in a human body. I remember I picked up Tony’s Appetites on a whim, on the way home from a clinic appointment. I figured, I can’t cook, I’ll never use this, but fuck it — I’m kind of a completionist and it was pretty. I like glossy photos of soup served in army helmets as much as the next guy. So that night I cracked a beer and had a couple of sausage-and-pepper sandwiches for dinner, per Tony’s recipe, and I felt pretty good about life. Cold pint, greasy sandwich: it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me (if I’d just had a sandy beach to fall asleep on, it would have been perfect). Every day is a gift! Eating disorder who?

More or less immediately following that I got a call from the ED clinic. I won’t bore you with the details, but they told me they couldn’t help me after all and had already closed my file — this after something like nine months of appointments, referrals, phone calls, general time-wasting. Did they have an alternative to suggest, anything other than this specific clinic that I could try? Didn’t I get a say here? Nope! Sorry! Good luck, kiddo.

So, as I tend to do when things go even slightly wrong, I spent some time feeling sorry for myself. It was like the third act of every romcom ever, except that I didn’t even have the cold comfort of working overtime at my job as an art dealer for dogs or whatever into which to throw myself. There was a lot of, like, dramatically eating saltines in bed and crying, sometimes concurrently. My fourteen-year-old self would’ve been proud.

(What the fuck was she so mad about, anyway? What is it about a relatively privileged, normal existence that fills our tiny early-adolescent hearts with rage? These days the mere thought of sending my coffee back when the barista fucks it up makes me want to take a nap.)

It felt like pointed rejection at the time and I took it really personally: I was being punished for getting my hopes up (the hopes of, you know, addressing my long-standing health issues in a somewhat constructive way) by a cruel and uncaring universe that laughed at my pain. Fuck you, Alana, specifically.

More than once I’ve caught myself thinking, really, Alana? This guy? This guy: the one with all the jokes about the easy targets du jour (your Kardashians, your Hiltons, whoever), the one who once stabbed a colleague with a carving fork (albeit non-fatally), who looked most of the time like an aging punk musician perpetually on the verge of drunkenly hitting on someone’s wife in a really inappropriate setting? I’ve shed actual tears over this dude and I didn’t know who he was five minutes ago, why am I taking this so hard? Why is it so hard?

There are a few reasons I can think of: one is that I read a lot of musicians’ memoirs at a tender age and they probably stuck with me more than I’d like. I’m a grown-ass adult woman and somewhere down deep I’m still harboring a tiny, tiny scrap of a desire to be a teenage lesbian Jim Morrison without all the substance abuse. Tony clearly spoke to my stupid adolescent daydreams of the romantic junkie poet: go watch the episode of No Reservations that features Siberia Bar, know that I read Marilyn Manson’s Long Hard Road Out of Hell at thirteen, and tell me you don’t see why baby me would have been all the fuck about it. I would have wanted to die at Siberia Bar, taking innumerable red-lipstick mirror selfies in the bathroom. It’s just that God gave me an anxiety disorder where my tortured-genius self-destructive rockstar impulses might otherwise be.

Another thing, and the more pertinent one, is something that’s no less true for how often everyone points it out about the guy: how honest he was. Sometimes to a fault. I don’t just mean the “talking shit about Emeril” kind of way, although that is entertaining. I mean how willing he was to say I don’t know, to say I fucked up and I’m not that guy anymore, to point out when some aspect of working on a show didn’t go the way it was meant to. That’s hard to do for anyone, let alone late-middle-aged straight white men — and, in this era of listening to someone talk about authenticity as brand while they feed you ladles of hummus? Vanishingly rare. It reminds me of a Dessa lyric, actually, from the song “5 out of 6”: I’ve put my time in now, I’m vetted, uncontested / see how an honest answer shuts down motherfuckers asking trick questions / I’m out here, arms wide, hiding nothing / I’ve done it all in broad daylight, and I left the cameras running.

On the anniversary of his passing, June 8th, I cooked dinner with a dear friend, smoked a bowl, and watched for the nth time the episode of No Reservations I mentioned above. It initially aired as a documentary around 2000, when he was touring Kitchen Confidential, and again in 2010, this time with the addition of Tony’s reactions to the original footage. “What an arrogant dick I was,” he said, with no small amount of disdain.

*

I’d love to tell you I had some kind of watershed moment after that phone call from the clinic, that I spent the following weeks in a different kind of movie montage; a single turning point, a breakthrough. Twenty years from now that’s probably how I’ll frame it in my bestselling memoir and none of you can tell me shit, but the reality was nothing so dramatic. I shook the crumbs out of my bedsheets and picked up Appetites again to find something I might, actually, be able to cook. Slowly, I started posting about my progress on instagram and tumblr — with the anxiety sirens screaming in my brain the whole time, as they do. I watched a lot (a Lot) of cooking shows and tutorials, started checking out cookbooks from the library, other chefs’ memoirs. Just surrounding myself in the language of food constantly made it less scary, even if I wasn’t necessarily applying it. Finally, I thought, I’m hyper-fixated on something useful. Instagram continues to recommend me posts of architecturally questionable canapes; all of my targeted ads lately have been for cheese.

*

One of the passages of Dessa’s book I underlined on first reading was from “Mirror Test”: Would I be the same me if I couldn’t sing? Yes, I think so. But what if I forgot how to read, forgot my name, forgot that I like whiskey, forgot that red is my favourite color? What am I subtracting from? Is there some part that can’t be ruined by time, or violence, or fatigue? Is there an apple core at the center that stays fixed?

Tony had a tattoo that said I am certain of nothing. I can’t think of anyone else who so frequently admitted his own ignorance and willingness to change (though maybe that’s easy for people to overlook in favor of the Kitchen Confidential of it all, the bravado and the dick jokes). Even if his shows were the purely selfish epicurean adventures he always claimed they were, a twenty-year exercise in self-indulgence, they had that, too.

I’m an anxious person. The thought of fucking something up makes me break out in hives. I’m more likely not to attempt something at all than I am to try and not get it perfect, whether other people can see me or not (even writing this has been driving me crazy despite the fact that I will inevitably just say fuck it and put it on tumblr because I’m sick of staring at it, then complain about it not being perfect. Apologies in advance to the group chat). This is something I know for sure about myself — I can’t change it, or at least, I know that trying to change it makes me miserable. All I can do is work on accepting it, learn how to live with it.

Therapy can be frustrating because it doesn’t always feel like you’re making progress, or that any progress you do make is so hard-won it’s not worth it, but cooking isn’t necessarily like that. You take some disparate parts, let your shoulders down, put on some Motown, and you’ve got a tangible, hopefully tasty result at the end of it all. The first time I made tomato sauce from scratch, tossed my perfectly al dente spaghetti with it: that’s a sense of accomplishment. These days, when something I’m cooking doesn’t turn out right, I can usually figure out why. Most of the time it’s still edible if not perfect and that’s fine. That’s progress.

*

All this said, I’m not Cured. I don’t want to imply that I’m somehow fixed: it’s still a struggle, most days. I’m a more confident cook than I was a year ago — who knows where I’ll be a year from now, or six months, or two. I’m not sure. I’m not sure why Tony made the choice that he did and I never will be. I’m still not sure why this guy; why, exactly, I burst into tears over him in therapy a while back. At least, not sure enough to put a bow on it; to summarize it neatly and tell the whole-ass internet about it, wrap it up in thoughtful, poetic voiceover, roll credits. And isn’t it a relief, sometimes, to say I don’t know?

I do know that if Tony’s taught me anything it’s to get comfortable(ish) with that, the not-knowing. That, and to be grateful, say thank you: for your time, your hospitality, teaching me something I didn’t know before. So — thanks, Tony. Wherever you are now, I hope it’s beautiful. I hope you’ve got a cold beer at your elbow and some warm sand between your toes.