Millions of people connect with his media persona, he was/is a cultural phenomenon. There is a picture of him that is treated like a shrine at my cousin's very good restaurant. Why did a man who seemingly had everything to live for take his own life? Not through an OD or other excess, but by hanging himself from a doorknob? The guy could score drugs in a second, why not ride it out in a heroin haze?
This whole thing is a puzzle to me and it seems wrapped up in his romantic life somehow? I remember seeing a picture of his girlfriend who was obviously cheating on him while "training" MMA etc...
I lose a lot of respect for people that "trade up" after they get famous and ditch their long time spouse that supported them when they were just a normal person, turnabout is fair play? Was it really that he could dish it out but couldn't take it?
Is this someone that people should look up to because he could be a charming bad boy for the cameras? I almost feel like it was too many 3rd world trips, I could actually see the pain he experienced while getting an "authentic" experience over and over again from people that wouldn't make in a lifetime what he made in a day. One or 2 fixers/guides even angled for some wealth or a chance to move to the US and pointed out the extreems, and that is just what they showed us on camera.
Anyhow, I'm a few glasses of wine in. Nowhere in my rambling, incoherent response did I come close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. We are all dumber for having read it. I award myself no points and may God have mercy on my soul.
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Notes -
How familiar with his work are you? Did you ever read Kitchen Confidential?
I ask because when you read the book that made Bourdain famous, it rapidly becomes obvious that he was troubled long before he was famous. He was the Samurai Sword kid at a liberal arts college before he dropped out and headed into the world of cooking. Much of the charm of the work comes from Bourdain's hard partying, booze and drug soaked world. He dropped in and out of cooking jobs and drugs over the years. His personality before fame was self-destructive.
The problem with finding causes for suicide is that you can always find someone who suffered something as bad or worse who didn't kill themselves. Some people kill themselves over seemingly minor slights, others suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune well past the point at which I would have cut bait.
I confess to never having read it, I have seen every episode and documentary that came out before his death including grainy "a chef's tour" episodes from the early days. I haven't watched any post suicide retrospectives.
It is true, you never know, that is one reason a gun in the house ups successful suicide rates so much, for some people it must just be a fleeting moment of "this is all too much", it passes for most but some pull the trigger, and a gun makes that easy (I say this as a gun toting red blooded american). But damn, sober doorknob hanging? That can't be a good way to go.
I highly recommend the book. It is extremely light and fun and easy, it's a great beach read kind of book. If you're interested in Bourdain's life and mind, I'd say it's a must, because that is the first work he published that made his name, or the last thing he wrote before becoming famous depending how you look at it. So I think it probably offers more insight, or unique insight, compared to his later works which are going to be influenced by his life.
Fascinating Factoid: a high percentage of people who jumped off the Golden Gate bridge and happened to survive said they regretted jumping immediately as they were falling.
The whole idea of placing blame for someone's suicide on a one-to-one basis is always going to end up hackneyed. At best you're talking about an egg-shell-skull on the part of the victim. Even someone like 2arms1head, who wrote a well-reasoned manifesto for why he killed himself, there are people like that still living.
I'd place suicide in general on a spectrum from self-preservation to self-destruction, shooting oneself in the head is one end of it, but something like heroin addiction is pretty close. You know it will kill you. Probably not today, but the odds of an OD add up until one day you don't make it. Bourdain:
He always had that self-destructive streak in him.
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