“We actually can learn a lot from celebrities,” blithely begins Charles Leerhsen’s unauthorised biography of the late Anthony Bourdain, Down and Out in Paradise. But what this unnecessary book teaches the reader is that the unauthorised celebrity biography is an inherently flawed project of which there are always new depths to plumb. In this one, for instance, someone who didn’t know him picks apart a dead man’s life and legacy, publishing intimate text messages sent between him and his lover in the last days of his life – and without her permission.
Recently released in the US, the book has already stirred strong criticism. Bourdain, who died in 2018 by suicide, was a giant of the food world, who came late in life to an unlikely career as a roving traveller and storyteller chronicling the culinary culture and politics of the farthest reaches of the planet. For those of us who were fans of his sometimes ribald but always open-hearted take on life, Bourdain has left behind hundreds of hours of carefully produced television, and a number of books – not least his down and dirty memoir of working as a chef in New York City, Kitchen Confidential, which sent him stratospherically to a level of fame for which he later said he was not wholly prepared.
