The world is still reeling from Anthony Bourdain’s suicide back in 2018 when he was found dead in a Tokyo hotel room after allegedly seeing pictures of his ex girlfriend Asia Argento with another man, but a new biography is also claiming that he never stopped drinking and hated himself.
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The controversial new book is written by journalist Charles Leerhsen and titled ‘Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain’, and details the final encounters of some of the friends and family of Bourdain before he took his life. A new excerpt have been released in The Guardian this week:
Bourdain knew when he started out in television that he was keen to ‘travel around the world, eat a lot of s**t and basically do whatever the f**k I want’.
That turned out to be a winning formula, and it left Tony with the distinct impression that, as he more than once said, ‘not giving a s**t is a really fantastic business model for television.
However, his trajectory was an age-old story of being careful what you wish for, of dealing with success and love in oceanic proportions.
He became someone that he hated. By the time he realised that, he was too physically exhausted to straighten things out. He thought it simpler to seek what is famously called ‘a permanent solution to a temporary problem’.
Recovery, you might say, was one of the few things he couldn’t go all the way with. If he did something, he did it all out, whether it was comic books as a kid or fascination with the JFK assassination. But he pulled up short with recovery; he never stopped drinking.
Yeah, not sure how much of all that is real as both Argento and Bourdain’s brother Christopher have complained that Leerhsen shouldn’t have published anything that they’ve said to him and that the book is ‘hurtful and defamatory fiction’ but it sort of makes sense when you consider his final days. I’m sure this book will sell well but I’m not sure if it’s really necessary to put all this stuff out there, especially without the permission of the family? Money talks though I suppose.
