“I was never sitting in a garret struggling over an unpublished manuscript,” Anthony Bourdain once told me about how he got started as a writer. As he chronicled in his bestselling gonzo memoir “Kitchen Confidential,” he was a chef in New York with excess appetites (food, booze, drugs) and a great gift for storytelling.
He landed that book contract completely by accident. He'd written an essay about working in a restaurant kitchen for the New York Press — the now-defunct scrappy free weekly that was always overshadowed by the Village Voice — but his editor couldn't get it in.
“Week after week, we kept getting bumped,” Bourdain said when we talked in Manhattan in 2011. “Out of frustration and drunken rage, I sent it to the New Yorker.”
The New Yorker published it. And a book contract soon followed.
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