Anthony Bourdain never stopped drinking despite overcoming a drug addiction and “hated” who he’d become when he took his own life in 2018, the author of a controversial new biography of the late TV chef has claimed.
Bourdain killed himself in France in June 2018 while filming for his CNN show Parts Unknown.
He had just broken up with his girlfriend Asia Argento and was heartbroken over photos of her with another man in Rome.
Bourdain’s final days are revisited in Down And Out In Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain, a controversial new biography by journalist Charles Leerhsen.
Bourdain’s brother Christopher tried to prevent the book from being published.
In an interview with The Guardian to promote the new work, Leerhsen recounted how Bourdain managed to overcome drug addiction but drank heavily until his death.
Bourdain killed himself in France in June 2018 while filming for his CNN show Parts Unknown. It will be shown at an event last year
Anthony Bourdain, photographed days before his death in June 2018, “never stopped drinking despite overcoming his drug addiction
He said he’d become someone he “hated” and rather than correct his behavior, he chose a “permanent solution to a temporary problem.”
Down And Out In Paradise: The Life Of Anthony Bourdain will be released on October 11th
“He became someone he hated. By the time he realized this, he was too physically exhausted to put things right.
“He found it easier to look for what is known to be called ‘a permanent solution to a temporary problem.’
“Recovery, you could say, was one of the few things he didn’t get to finish with.
“If he did anything, he did anything, whether it was comics as a kid or fascination with the assassination of JFK. But he stopped short of recovery; he never stopped drinking,” said Leerhsen.
He said he was motivated to write the book to understand why a man with an apparently happy life committed suicide.
“It’s an ancient tale of how to pay attention to what you desire, how to deal with success and love in oceanic proportions.”
Leerhsen’s book was met with anger by the Bourdain family.
The author describes Bourdain’s relationship with Asia Argento as “a classic adolescent case where the boy wants the girl more than the girl wants to be wanted”.
The daughter of the TV chef Ariane was 11 years old at the time of his death. According to the new bio, he had all but “disappeared” from her life.
His brother Christopher twice appealed to publisher Simon and Schuster to halt publication, insisting that much of the book was inaccurate.
Despite its protests, the publisher is sticking to the October 11 release date.
“Everything he writes about relationships and interactions within our family as children and adults, he made it up or completely misunderstood it,” Christopher said in a recent interview with The New York Times.
Leerhsen claims that Bourdain’s romance with Argento was a “classic, youthful-sounding case of the boy wanting the girl more than the girl wanted to be wanted.”
“The more he pushes on her, the more she pulls away,” he said.
In their most recent text exchange, she told him to stop “busting her balls” after she was photographed with French journalist Hugo Clement in Rome.
Bourdain with his ex-wife Ottavia Busia-Bourdain. The book describes her as his confidante towards the end of his life
Argento did not collaborate with the author.
She has spoken out in the past about how the world wrongly blamed her for Bourdain’s suicide and told in an exclusive 2018 interview that she did nothing wrong by cheating on him because he was her also “cheated”.
“It wasn’t a problem for us,” she said at the time.
Argento has since moved on with Italian MMA fighter Michele Titi Martignoni, who is 20 years his junior.
The book also looks at Bourdain’s relationship with his ex-wife, Ottavia Busia-Bourdain, whom Leerhsen describes as his confidant.
She is not fighting the publication of the book.