Review of Care and Feeding: A Memoir by Laurie Woolever

*Care and Feeding: A Memoir* by Laurie Woolever (2025). Published by Ecco.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

This blog post is interesting to me because lately, I’ve been struggling to get in my reading time. I was working for the longest time as a freelancer and contractor, but recently pivoted to an 8-5 job where I’m in an office. It’s not hybrid, so I’m always at home trying to put the puzzle pieces together of how I’ll get my reading done. I also continue working on this blog when I’m not at work, so the Instagram reels I’m fed about a 5-9 feel too real right now.

Anyways, I am trying to find that time to read here and there. Somehow I’m still on track for my Goodreads goal, even though I’ve been slowly giving up on the notion of reading goals in life. I think they can be a little too much pressure and takes the fun off of reading at the end of the day, and I want to read because I want to stay in touch with literature while also pursuing my side career as a writer.

I do try to listen to audiobooks during my commute, or during the rare work from home days, as I find they get me to focus more in a way that’s productive. If I was going to wear headphones around the office I would totally listen to audiobooks, but I find that I prefer to work without headphones because people tend to stop my desk pretty often.

It was driving to and from work that I got done Care and Feeding, which is a book I first spotted at a McNally Jackson in New York, took a picture of the cover, and decided I was going to pick it up later. And I did!

Let’s get into the review.

Laurie Woolever describes her childhood in the suburbs to how she was around some of the biggest figures in New York City’s culinary scene.

I will admit, for some context, that before seeing this book in the bookstore (McNally Jackson), I had no idea who Laurie Wooleer is. I know who the people she talks about in this book are, as they’re some pretty big names, but I didn’t know that Laurie was affiliated with them. I did know that the synopsis sounded interesting, which is why I picked this book up in the first place.

Anyways, we begin this memoir with Laurie’s humble beginnings. Like so many ambitious people who end up in New York City, she was born and raised in a small town. She came from this town in search of a career in New York, landed in the food world, and was working in and out of big restaurants and food publications.

We see early on that she scraped a name for herself in a world that was very much dominated by men with big personalities. That’s a theme throughout this book for me—there are a lot of influential men in the cooking and food world that can do almost whatever they want, because they’re powerful, and no one will really question them openly.

But for Laurie, she managed to survive and even was working with Anthony Bourdain. Those were some of the most interesting sections of the book for me, as someone who was familiar with Bourdain’s television work and writing up until his death, but there are some key insights you’ll get in this memoir.

There’s also the portions of the memoir about her addiction. She spends a lot of her life working and traveling for work, then she becomes a mother, but there also is a major thread of alcohol and drugs being thrown around into these people’s, including Laurie’s lives. As someone familiar with creative spaces, especially in New York, this is unsurprising, so I didn’t find any sections of the memoir dealing with this to be that out there.

I could see how someone else might be scandalized by what Woolever is writing about, especially if they’re unfamiliar with how things work in high creative scenes. I mean I was in high school and reading Stephen King’s memoir on writing, and he literally wrote about how high he was writing some of his novels that he couldn’t even remember writing them. This isn’t new information for artists.

Regardless, Woolever is pretty candid and honest (as far as I could tell) with the details of her career and who she worked with. There was some slightly unflattering depictions throughout the memoir, but that’s what I see as honest from her perspective. Some people we look up to might not be the greatest person to everyone, or even a large amount of people—that’s a fact of life as well.

Overall Thoughts

I thought this was a great book to listen to on audiobook, and maybe down the line, when I have actual space and a home for myself, I’ll actually sit down and buy a copy of this book for my physical collection. Right now a girl only has so much room, which means I have to be more choosy about what books come into my life in a physical sense.

That said, despite not knowing anything about Woolever going into this, I found that she had a distinct voice as a writer and storyteller, as well as a good story to tell. If you’re interested in her or the people she’s talking about, then definitely give this book a chance in the near future.

I did enjoy it overall is what I’m saying! It’s always interesting to take a peek into the world of food during this time, but Woolever provides a different perspective. I thought it was valuable to take in, especially considering how complicated people like Bourdain are with their legacies.

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