From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

Welcome to the Treatment, the Home Edition. I'm Elvis Mitchell.

My guest is a pretty accomplished writer and observed for the culture herself and

got a chance in working with Anthony Bourdain to work as assistant. And basically, she was the

person who kept all the trains running for him. She is the author recently of the book Bordane,

the definitive oral biography. And she also hosts a terrific podcast called Carbface. I'm talking

to Lori, Wolliver. Lori, thank you so much for doing the show. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.

You really use a book as a way to kind of chart his emotional growth. And was that the way you'd set out to do it?

The initial idea with the oral biography was to just simply tell

the full story of a person who told a lot of his own story. But if you've read Kitchen Confidential,

which many millions of us have, you know that the story touches down a couple of points in his youth and then really

jumps right into the kitchen years, understandably. And that's really where the meat of his story was

up until the point of publication in 2000. So there are a lot of pieces of his life story that he

hadn't told, that were not these carefully crafted stories

that he had been telling about himself for years and years.

So in order to create a fuller picture,

it was really just, let's do a chronological treatment

from beginning to end.

And what became apparent very quickly

in starting the interview process is that it really

was a story of one man's kind of emotional growth, or in some cases lack thereof. I mean,

you know, I have a lot of respect for Tony. He was a friend and a mentor and my boss for a long time.

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