We at MUNCHIES are devastated by the death of Anthony Bourdain, one of our friends and heroes. In his memory, we're running a series of essays about the ways he changed our lives. If you or someone you know is considering suicide, help is available. Call 1-800-273-8255 to speak with someone now or text START to 741741 to message with the Crisis Text Line.

It’s hard to overstate just how completely perfect it was. How on the nose. I was but a babe in the woods when Kitchen Confidential came out, working in my first Big Time professional kitchen. The place was Brennan’s of Houston, a sister restaurant of New Orleans’ famed Commander’s Palace, and it was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. It was hot and mean and fast-paced and dangerous. People yelled insults at me in Spanish I didn’t understand. Others yelled insults at me in English I understood all too well. I was wholly unprepared. Lost. Then Anthony Bourdain entered my life, and I was...a little less lost.

You have to understand, before Brennan’s, I’d worked at a bakery in the Houston suburbs. It was quaint. Easygoing. I baked wedding and sheet cakes, cookies, tarts, and petit fours. I made buttercream by the ton. They gave me the keys to the place after a few months, and let me pick the tunes while we worked. When the head baker left for a plush job at a hotel in Hawaii, I thought “Maybe this can be my career.” I’d already dropped out of college a few times. Why not enroll in the culinary program at the local community college?

So that’s what I did. And neither it or the bakery prepared me for the brutality of life in a real professional kitchen—the back-breaking hours, the dedication to excellence, the humiliation. The drugs. Brennan’s thrust me unwittingly into all that, literally a trial by fire. None of it made any sense until I picked up Kitchen Confidential. In it, my lived experience was being told back to me in vivid detail. Bourdain’s first summer kitchen job at a dive, The Flagship (aka The Dreadnaught), in Provincetown, Massachusetts, was basically Brennan’s without the white tablecloths. The stories of working in the trenches with towering degenerates—pirates, Bourdain called them—fiercely dedicated to toiling in obscurity and humping out hot plates was my life.

Kitchen Confidential described an industry and the people in it, often at its and their reckless worst, and it was like looking at strands of my own DNA under a microscope.

I read it in a day. Immediately after, I became an apostle. I gave it to every cook on the line with me who was interested in reading, and some who steadfastly were not. They all fell in instant love. “Who is this man telling our story?” we thought. We’d talk about him over drinks after shift (there were always drinks after shift). In some ways, when we had too much (we always had too much), we’d get weepy about it and him. The biography Bourdain wrote of all our lives was slowly changing our perspective about the jobs we were doing.