Anthony Bourdain
I’m not normally emotionally affected by the deaths of celebrities, but the sudden death of celebrity chef and TV host Anthony Bourdain last June resonated with me unaccountably. I don’t want to sound cold, but I think it’s difficult to feel real grief for anyone we don’t know personally. Very simply, there’s more than enough grief and heartbreak waiting for us with the death of family and friends, even pets; shows of mourning over people we’ve only known as media consumers has always seemed more like hysterical public rituals than real bereavement.
Bourdain was an author and chef, but his real fame came as the host of a series of food and travel shows he started making in 2002, starting at the Food Network and the Travel Network before moving on to CNN with Parts Unknown. It was while working on an episode of that series in France that he hung himself in his hotel room in the town of Kaysersberg, near Strasbourg. He was discovered by his best friend, celebrity chef Eric Ripert, who had been traveling with Bourdain and his crew.
I liked Bourdain, though I never met him. I read his bestselling 2000 book, Kitchen Confidential, back when I was teaching myself to cook and eating out in restaurants regularly, and just before a brief stint as a food writer. With that book he created a voice and a persona – snarky but passionate, wise-cracking and studiously cynical but longing to find things to engage him.
He knew that those things were out waiting for him in the world, but lacked the means to escape the drudge work of a working chef until the book opened doors to a lifestyle he’d never imagined for himself. Watching Bourdain discover that world was one of the ongoing pleasures of his shows, and I couldn’t help but identify with him, sharing as I did a similar longing to get out into that larger, stranger world.
I’ve spent the last month or so watching the eight seasons of Parts Unknowncurrently on Netflix and reading his 2010 follow-up to Kitchen Confidential, Medium Raw. I found myself moved to do this by the question that suicides almost inevitably leave behind them: Why? In Bourdain’s case, even more than with most celebrity suicides, he left behind a long trail, both on paper and video.
A suicide’s wake leaves behind plenty of red flags, most visible only with suddenly acute hindsight. Despair is one of those red flags, and it’s not hard to find. “Despair –“ he writes in the final chapter of Medium Raw(ironically titled “Still Here”) “always a sometime thing in the bipolar world of the kitchen – becomes more frequent and longer-lasting as one grows more philosophical with age and has more to despair about.”
It’s a curious statement. I’ve suffered from depression on and off throughout my life, but I’ve found that age and “growing more philosophical” has offered increasing respite with time. But the meaning is certainly clear: for Bourdain, things were getting worse, not better, despite the success, the money, and the acclaim.
Earlier in the book he writes about a particular low point in his life, where he’d hold up for weeks on the Dutch side of the island of Saint-Martin, “aimless and regularly suicidal.” He would spend the day drinking and speed along the coastal road after sunset, toying with the idea of not turning the wheel at the next curve in the road, depending on whatever song came on the radio next.
In an episode of season eight of Parts Unknown, Bourdain is in Buenos Aires, where he visits a psychoanalyst – apparently a common activity for most Argentinians in the middle class and up. “I’d like to be happy,” he says, his tall frame stretched out on the analyst’s couch. “I’d like to be happier. I should be happy. I have incredible luck. I’d like to be able to look out the window and say, yay, life is good.”
“And you don’t?” she asks him.
“Nah.”
The final episode of the series aired in November, a love letter to New York City’s Lower East Side neighbourhood filmed just two months before his death that also served as an epitaph for Bourdain. It was a crucial place for Bourdain early in his life and his career, and also the scene of his addiction to heroin, methadone, and crack cocaine in the ‘80s. Along with his former addictions, he revisits musicians, directors, artists, and other cultural figures who were immensely important to him – people like Richard Hell, Lydia Lunch, Joe Coleman, Fab Five Freddy, Kembra Pfahler, Harley Flanagan, Amos Poe, Jim Jarmusch, and John Lurie.
They’re all cult figures for the most part, but most of them were as pivotal to me as they were to Bourdain, who frequently shared tables with people like them throughout his TV career. (I’m also certain that this will be the first and last time their names will be printed in this paper.) Which is the main reason why I identified so strongly with Bourdain, and probably why I was so affected by his death.
I was formed by a lot of the same culture that informed Bourdain’s worldview – the angry, loud, often nihilistic and oppositional music and art that began coalescing at the turn of the ‘70s and came together with the lightning spark of punk rock near the middle of that decade. It was about anger – an emotion that Bourdain repeatedly talked about as a primal motivation – and the need to define yourself in opposition to mainstream culture and attitudes. It’s immensely attractive to a young person, but increasingly problematic as you get older.
In a chapter of Medium Rawhe talks about becoming a father and the need to stop acting like an angry punk kid and imagining that makes you cool. “As any conscientious father knows in his bones, any remaining trace elements of coolness go right out the window from the second you lay eyes on your firstborn.”
He quotes writer Norman Mailer’s description of coolness as “a decision to encourage in psychopath in oneself,” and admits that he took this as a prescription – a way of life. “I encouraged the psychopath in myself for most of my life. In fact, that’s a rather elegant description of whatever it was I was doing. But I figure I put in my time.”
Bourdain’s upbringing was, by his own admission, privileged. His father was a record company executive and his mother was an editor at the New York Times and he grew up as clean and spoiled as any middle class Baby Boomer child, and as intent on rebelling as much of his cohort.
The counterculture as it evolved from the hippies to the punks gave him the sense of mission and place that his “fastidious” upbringing lacked. Religion played next to no part. His mother was Jewish, his father Catholic, but their family was as secular as most people with their mildly bohemian lifestyles.
In an episode of Parts Unknown filmed in Granada during Holy Week, Bourdain and his hosts wander through the city while religious processions make their way up and down the streets. He’s visibly unmoved by the sight of the statues of saints carried on heavy litters and the marching, hooded penitentés and begs to be led to the nearest tapas bar. Like so many people who consider themselves irreligious, Bourdain was happy to invoke God and the spirit of the divine when talking about a meal or an experience that transported him, while denying the existence of that God in the next breath. It’s a trick many people perform daily; I did it myself for many years.
Suicide is apparently on the rise. A Washington Post article printed the same month that Bourdain died describes it as a public health crisis. “If you think of (suicide) as other leading causes of death, like AIDS and cancer, with the public health approach, mortality rates decline,” said Christine Moutier, medical director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention “We know that same approach can work with suicide.”
It’s hard not to wonder how difficult it might be to battle this apparent epidemic, especially for medical professionals, when euthanasia is being mainstreamed as an option for both the physically and mentally ill. It’s no longer acceptable to talk about the “sin of despair,” especially when governments and hospitals are seemingly intent on making death-on-demand part of the menu of services, couched in the language of “relief” and “compassion.”
I wonder how much of this might have been on Anthony Bourdain’s mind while he rationalized how to ignore his success – his “luck,” as he described it – and the life-changing responsibility he’d discovered and wrote about when he became a father. Even surrounded by a crew that had grown around him like a kind of family over a decade and a half, and with his best friend nearby, he apparently had no backstop, nothing in his culture or his belief system that would have said that what he was contemplating was inappropriate and unacceptable.
Because a suicide leaves behind grief and anger and confusion and dismay. The sin of despair’s baleful effect is to sow more despair. Most of the time this only resonates among family and friends, but a celebrity suicide sends out shock waves into the world, and complete strangers will be shot through with that grief and confusion. A small tragedy casts a long shadow, and we’re all somehow lessened by a desperate decision we could not have imagined or prevented.
