Anthony Bourdain’s assistant reveals his final text to her before taking his life
Warning: This story contains mentions of suicide
Laurie Woolever, the personal assistant of the late Anthony Bourdain, delved into some details on her last interaction with the celebrity chef before he took his own life back in 2018.
Sharing an excerpt of her upcoming memoir Care and Feeding with PEOPLE, Woolever took the time to reflect on her experience working as the personal assistant of Bourdain up to her last text exchange with him the night before his suicide in France.
She shared that Bourdain had asked her to schedule a number of things for him the day prior, such as a lunch, a haircut, a doctor's appointment, a private session with his jiu-jitsu trainer for the week after his return to New York.
At the time, he and his girlfriend, Italian actress Asia Argento, were going through a rough patch after the latter was caught by paparazzi kissing French journalist Hugo Clément.
"'I hope you’re doing OK,' I texted to him, and when he responded, 'I’ll live, and we’ll survive,' I assumed that the 'we' meant him and Asia, their complicated relationship," Woolever wrote in the memoir.
"At 4:25 the next morning, my phone vibrated on the windowsill next to my bed, waking me from a light sleep. It was Kim, Tony’s agent. When I answered the call, she said, 'Tony has taken his life.' I thought, we can fix this," she added.
Woolever shared how she felt obligated to fix "the mess he made," detailing that Bourdain had "glibly threatened" to hang himself a million times "in the face of something as minor as a bad hamburger or a delayed flight."
Bourdain was found dead by suicide in his room at Le Chambard hotel in Kaysersberg near Colmar. He was in the middle of working on an episode of travel and food show Parts Unknown in Strasbourg, with his frequent collaborator and friend, Éric Ripert.
Argento later opened up about his death in an interview with DailyMailTV, admitting that she initially felt "angry" at him for "abandoning" their kids.
"But now it’s been replaced just by this loss, this hole, that cannot be filled by anything," she said.
On claims by bashers that she was the one who led him to commit suicide, Argento said, "People say I killed him. I understand that the world needs to find a reason. I would like to find a reason, too."
"We are not children. I cannot think of Anthony as somebody who would do an extreme gesture for this, who suffered like that. What I do feel terrible about is that he had so much pain inside of him and I didn’t see it. I did not see it. And for that, I will feel guilty for the rest of my life," she continued.
Bourdain rose to fame for his culinary writings and for traveling the globe to host his widely popular TV shows, No Reservations and Parts Unknown.
Woolever's memoir is set to be released on March 11.
