What If “I’m Fine” Is The Biggest Lie We Tell Each Other?

Sophia Leon S.

10 minutes ago

10 min read

Watching Tony made me think about Anthony Bourdain, and the sad truth that someone can be deeply loved, wildly successful, constantly smiling, and still be fighting something nobody around them can see.

I have been thinking about Anthony Bourdain since I watched Tony, and frankly, I didn't expect a film about a 19-year-old chef I knew almost nothing about to move me this much.

So, before I say anything else, go watch it, okay?! I really, reeeally loved this film, and yes a few tears were shed… There is something about watching a real person's life before they become the person you know that I find so unbearably fascinating. We know how their story ends, we know who they become, and yet suddenly we're watching them as some awkward, ambitious, slightly lost version of themselves, long before the world has any idea who they are.

I knew Bourdain the way most people probably do. A few episodes of Parts Unknown. A man sitting at a table somewhere in the world, eating something I had never heard of, talking to people I would probably never meet, somehow making food feel like the least interesting and most important part of the story at the exact the same time. These are the types of shows I watch and think, “I will have a show like that one day.” Which I 100% will, just wait and see…

I knew the voice. The swagger, the sarcasm, the curiosity, the cigarettes, the kitchens, the tattoos, the endless travelling… Basically I knew the finished product, but I didn't really know the beginning. And probably that is why Tony managed to move me so much.

The film takes us back to when Anthony Bourdain was nineteen, before Kitchen Confidential, before television, before Parts Unknown, before the world had decided who he was. He is a restless, difficult, ambitious young man working in a Cape Cod restaurant kitchen, trying to figure out what the hell he is supposed to do with himself, while impulsively following Nancy to Provincetown. The movie is not a literal reconstruction of his life. Much of its narrative is fictionalised, built from fragments of Bourdain's own memoir and early experiences, and its director deliberately keeps the story contained to one formative summer.

This is what makes it so fascinating to me, you are watching a person before he becomes the person you know. And suddenly all the things we associate with him feel less inevitable. He wasn't born Anthony Bourdain, a cultural icon. - He became him.

And that is one of my favourite things about films based on true stories. I love getting to see the awkward, unfinished version of someone. The person before the biography, before the awards. Before the photographs become iconic, before everyone else knows the, especially in this case, tragic ending…

Because when you already know what someone becomes, you start looking for clues. You see every strange little decision as destiny. Every mistake becomes foreshadowing, every unusual quality becomes evidence that this person was always destined to be extraordinary. Even the rejections get their own little destiny narrative...

And maybe that's one of the great illusions of hindsight. We look at extraordinary people after they have become extraordinary and assume there must have been something obvious about them all along. I mean, sometimes there probably was. Sometimes there really is something unconventional in someone. Something restless, something obsessive, something that refuses to fit neatly into the life everyone else seems to be living.

Bourdain undeniably had that.

His early life was marked by a fascination with writing, kitchens, subcultures and transgression. He dropped out of college, enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America, immersed himself in restaurant life, and later struggled deeply with heroin addiction before eventually getting sober. He spent years writing and submitting fiction before the essay that changed everything was published in The New Yorker in 1999.

And then, in his forties, everything suddenly opened.

Don't Eat Before Reading This became the foundation for Kitchen Confidential. The book made him famous. Television followed, and eventually Parts Unknown turned him into something much stranger than a celebrity chef. He became a traveller, storyteller, interviewer, cultural observer and, for many people, a person who somehow made the world feel bigger.

He was, in a very literal sense, a late bloomer. The New Yorker described him as having “bloomed late,” noting that it was only in his mid-forties that writing and television gave him a career outside the kitchen. Bourdain himself reportedly described everything that followed his first decades of work as “extra innings.”

Don’t you find that incredibly comforting? I know I do. We are so obsessed with early success. We want to know what a person was doing at twenty-two. At twenty-five. At thirty… We want the perfect trajectory. The five-year fucking plan. The photograph from childhood where the future CEO was apparently already organising the family finances while the rest of us were eating crayons, right?

But you know what, some people simply take longer to become themselves. And you know what else? Sometimes the most interesting life is the one that doesn't make sense until halfway through.

There is something else I kept thinking about while watching Tony, though, and this is perhaps the part that has stayed with me most: We think we know people because we know their stories.

But a story is not a person? We know what someone tells us, we know the version of them they can articulate. We know what they show us, we know the jokes, we know the photographs, we know the Instagram. We know that they are successful, that they are funny, that they seem confident. We know that they are the person everyone calls when something goes wrong.

And sometimes we therefore make the most dangerous assumption of all: They're okay, offuckingcourse they are okay! Look at them!

Anthony Bourdain spent years becoming one of the most recognisable people in television. He travelled constantly, met strangers, ate extraordinary food, built friendships across borders and seemed endlessly curious about the world. He was also a person with a documented history of addiction and self-destructive behaviour, and a life that contained much more darkness than the public image could ever reveal. The New Yorker wrote after his death that beneath the vivaciousness and swagger was a man whose life had been marked by anger, hard-drug use and other self-destructive behaviour.

And in 2018, at 61, he died by suicide while in France filming Parts Unknown………….

I don't think his death should be used to create some beautiful mythology about the tortured genius. That is too easy. It almost makes suffering sound glamorous. It turns mental illness into a footnote in the story of greatness. It allows us to look backwards and say, "Of course. He was brilliant, therefore he must have been broken," right?

But life doesn't work that neatly… Mental illness does not make someone a genius. Talent does not inevitably create suffering, and suffering does not make someone's talent more legitimate.

Sometimes a person is simply carrying something enormous that nobody else can see. And that, to me, is the more heartbreaking lesson. Because we have become incredibly good at reading people from the outside. We decide someone is confident, happy, successful, strong, SORTED, independent, LUCKY.

We see the person arriving at dinner with a huge smile and assume they have had a good day, we see someone travelling the world and assume they must be fulfilled, we see the person who is always making everyone else laugh and assume they are fine. We see the woman who seems to have everything together, the man who never talks about his problems. The friend who always answers the phone. The person who somehow keeps going.

And what if we are wrong? Not necessarily catastrophically wrong, we don’t have to be. But wrong enough to forget that there is an entire internal world inside every person we meet that we will never have complete access to.

We don't know how many battles someone has already won. We don't know which ones they are still fighting. We don't know what they think about when they are alone. We don't know what they are afraid of. We don't know how hard it is for them to get out of bed some mornings. We don't know whether the confidence is effortless or carefully constructed… We don't know whether the smile is happiness or simply a habit.

And perhaps most importantly, we don't know how much someone is carrying while still managing to show up. That doesn't mean we should become paranoid about everyone we meet, don’t get me wrong.. It means we should become kinder.

Because kindness is one of the few things we can give people without needing to know their entire history first. We don't have to know that someone is struggling to treat them gently. We don't have to wait until someone tells you they are falling apart before you check in.

And maybe we need to become more comfortable asking the people who seem completely fine how they are actually doing. Not the automatic fucking ridiculous“How are you?”, that we ask while already reaching for our phones.

The real one; How are you? And then staying long enough to hear the answer. I think there is a weird cruelty in the way we sometimes praise people for how well they carry their pain. We call them strong, we admire their resilience… We say, I don't know how you do it. And you know, sometimes the person doesn't know either. They are simply doing it… Until they aren't.

That is why I think the story of someone like Bourdain should not leave us with the idea that extraordinary people are secretly doomed. The bottom line is, that we really don't know what is happening inside another human being. Not even close.

Bourdain's career was built, in part, around looking beneath surfaces. What I loved about him was that he wasn't interested in the polished version of food or travel or culture. He wanted the kitchen after midnight, the back room, the street corner, the real uncomfortable conversations. The parts people normally edited out. If you ask me, his greatest gift was making strangers feel worth listening to. It is something I try to do myself, because I genuinely believe everyone around us is worth acknowledging.

And I feel that is another reason why his story feels so sad to me and tears me up. A man who spent so much of his life looking closely at everyone else remained, in some essential way, unknowable, almost unseen. I mean, how could he be so seen and so unseen at the same time? Like many of us...

And that may be the most remarkable thing about being alive. We spend our entire lives surrounded by other people, loving them, fighting with them, sleeping beside them, working with them, travelling with them, watching them grow older, and still there is always a room inside another person that we cannot ever enter.

We can only try to knock, we can ask, we can listen, we can notice when someone seems different. We can send the message, we can make the call. We can sit down next to someone and say, I don't need you to be okay right now. I just want to know how you are.

Maybe that sounds really small, but trust me, it isn't...

Because if Tony left me with anything, it is this: don't confuse someone's ability to keep going with evidence that they are okay. Don't assume the strong person doesn't need checking in on. Don't assume the successful person isn't struggling. Don't assume the funny one isn't hurting. Don't assume the person who seems most put together has nothing falling apart behind the scenes… And don't wait for the dramatic moment before you decide to be kind.

Anthony Bourdain once spent his life trying to convince us to look closer at the world. Maybe the simplest thing his story can ask of us now is to look a little closer at each other, too.

We never really know what someone is carrying. Sometimes the person smiling across the table from you is carrying more than you could possibly know or imagine. I think about that a lot, because I know how easy it is to make yourself look fine. To show up smiling, make everyone laugh, be the person who checks on everyone else, who tries to make someone else's day a little lighter, while quietly carrying things you never quite find the words to explain. And maybe there are more people doing exactly that than any of us realise.

So please ask, stay, listen, and be kind. You don't need to know someone's demons to make their day a little easier to survive.

Sources

A24, Tony (2026)

Official film page. Useful for the basic premise, director, cast, and the fact that the film follows 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain as he travels to Provincetown and enters the restaurant world. A24 Films Watch / learn more about Tony

The New Yorker, “Anthony Bourdain’s Moveable Feast” (2017)

One of the best pieces for understanding Bourdain’s early life, Nancy Putkoski, Vassar, his decision to attend the Culinary Institute of America, his attraction to the restaurant world, and the beginnings of the person he became.The New Yorker Read the New Yorker profile

The New Yorker, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This” by Anthony Bourdain (1999)

This is the original essay that helped transform Bourdain’s writing career and became the foundation for Kitchen Confidential. It is particularly useful for understanding the voice that existed before the television personality. The New Yorker Read Bourdain’s original essay

The New Yorker, “Anthony Bourdain and the Power of Telling the Truth” (2018)

Particularly useful for understanding why Bourdain connected with people. The piece examines his relationship to honesty, contradiction, bad behaviour and the uncomfortable realities behind polished surfaces. The New Yorker Read the essay

Peabody Awards, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown

A useful independent recognition of what made Parts Unknown culturally significant. The Peabody citation emphasizes that the series went beyond food and travel, using Bourdain’s curiosity and relationships with people to explore places and cultures. The Peabody Awards – Stories That Matter Read the Peabody profile

Further Reading & Watching

Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (2021)

An intimate documentary portrait of Bourdain’s life and career, directed by Morgan Neville. It offers a useful companion to Tony, particularly for readers interested in the person behind the public figure. Focus Features Watch / learn more about Roadrunner

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

The essential reading alongside Tony. Bourdain’s memoir offers a window into his early years in the restaurant world and became the book that transformed him from a respected chef and struggling writer into a major public figure. Amazon Kitchen Confidential

A Cook’s Tour

A key book for understanding the beginnings of the Bourdain who would later become known for his food and travel television. The book grew out of his first major international food-and-travel project, which helped establish the blueprint for his later television work. Google Books Read more about A Cook’s Tour

The New Yorker Festival: Anthony Bourdain in conversation with David Remnick

A chance to hear Bourdain thinking and speaking in his own words, covering his career, Kitchen Confidential, Parts Unknown, food and his approach to storytelling. The New Yorker Anthony Bourdain’s interview with David Remnick

Medium Raw

A particularly interesting follow-up because it shows Bourdain after the transformation. Medium Raw reflects on his journey from journeyman cook to global television personality and on what happened after Kitchen Confidential changed his life. Amazon Medium Raw