“Down and Out in Paradise,” by Charles Leerhsen, is an unvarnished account of a turbulent life.
Anthony Bourdain would have hated that autocorrect turns his name into Boursin, a bland cheese with zero culinary credibility.
It’s surprising that predictive text doesn’t suggest his name first. Bourdain: He’s hot, he’s sexy and he’s dead, as Rolling Stone said about Jim Morrison on a notorious 1981 cover.
Since his death by his own hand in France, in 2018, there’s been a steady drip of books and documentaries and television specials and magazine one-offs about his life and career.
On social media, he’s omnipresent in old clips, explaining how to make a Negroni or ripping the phrase “farm to table.” There are a lot of poignant Bourdain tattoos jiggling around out there.
A new biography, “Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain,” by Charles Leerhsen, is making news. It’s grittier than anything we’ve read about him before.
Here are the prostitutes, a lot of prostitutes, and one-night stands, and rumors of affairs with other food-world personalities.
Here is the use of steroids, human growth hormone and Viagra. Here are exact, disturbing details about his suicide. His heroin habit is recounted. So is his frequent coldness to many who loved and worked with him.
A previous book, “Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography” (2021), compiled by Laurie Woolever, felt like an official Bourdain-industry product. It was worthy but dull.
It was heavy on pontificating celebrities, from the food, television and journalism worlds, who tried to puzzle out what made this magnificent, pagan, literate, lantern-jawed beast tick, to put him on the couch.
Leerhsen’s book, on the other hand, has a lot of people trying to join Bourdain on the couch, ideally without his trousers, and thus has more adrenaline and feels truer to life.
Most human beings have more desires than opportunities in life. Those whom the gods will destroy are provided with desire and opportunity in equal measure.
“Down and Out in Paradise” reminded me in certain ways of Albert Goldman’s muckraking 1981 biography of Elvis Presley. Leerhsen leans heavily, for example, on unnamed sources.
He’s not here, though, to discredit or dismiss his subject. His admiration for Bourdain is nearly always apparent. It’s hard to say if Bourdain would have liked this book. Either way, I suspect he would have admired the author’s guts.
“Down and Out in Paradise” is not the most subtle thing you’ll ever read. Leerhsen is a former executive editor at Sports Illustrated whose previous books include biographies of Ty Cobb and Butch Cassidy. His Bourdain book goes down like a mass-market rock bio.