Time.news – “After Anthony Bourdain took his own life in a hotel room in France in 2018, his closest friends, family and people who had helped him become an international TV star for decades sewed the their mouths with the media and remaining silent, especially about his last days ”, writes the New York Times in remembering the chef, gastronome, writer and popular American personality.
But the silence lasted only until, in 2021, many in his close circle of friends were interviewed for two documentaries that “showed a more complex side of Bourdain, became increasingly conflicted due to his success and also due to his relationship of the last two years with the Italian actress Asia Argento”.
The Times announces that on October 11, publisher Simon & Schuster will publish what is termed the first unauthorized biography of the travel writer and documentary maker (“Down and out in Paradise: the life of Anthony Bourdain”), which includes “unpublished and intimate details, including harsh and distressed texts from the days before Bourdain’s deathlike his last exchanges with Asia Argento and Ottavia Busia-Bourdain, his wife for 11 years who, when they separated in 2016, had also become his confidant ”, underlines the publisher.
So much so that in one of his letters to his wife, the popular chef writes: “I also hate my fans. I hate being famous. I hate my job. I am alone and I live in uncertainty“. The article in the New York daily also reads that “drawing from over 80 interviews and files, texts and e-mails from Bourdain’s phone and laptop, journalist Charles Leerhsen, former executive director of Sports Illustrated and People, retraces his metamorphosis from a grumpy teenager in a suburb of New Jersey to the swaggering attitude of a chef who also achieved wealth as a writer who later became a commentator with a singular talent thanks to his many travels “.
Leerhsen’s is the portrait of a man who at the end of his life was “alone, injecting himself with steroids, drinking until he fainted, dating prostitutes, almost disappeared from the life of his 11-year-old daughter“. Even before the book comes out it is already a case. Brother Christopher Bourdain sent publisher Simon & Schuster two emails in August calling the book an “offensive and defamatory fiction” and asking that it not be published until Leehsen’s numerous errors were corrected. One source could be the ex-wife herself, Busia-Bourdain.
The book traces the life of Bourdain and a part is dedicated to the stormy relationship with Asia Argento, about which the chef writes to his ex-wife: “I find myself madly in love with this woman“and for which – reconstructs the author – he has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars providing financial support to her, her two children and sometimes her friends.” A stormy relationship, however, that between Bourdain and Argento. an email to the New York Times said he hadn’t read the book, adding, “I clearly wrote to the author that he couldn’t publish anything I told him.”