10 Apr 2026

Author’s note / Fish tale

Laurie Woolever visits the Land Down Under; new short fiction from Luke O’Neil

Bondi Beach as seen from coastal cliff trail. All photos courtesy the author.

Today: Laurie Woolever, author of Appetites, World Travel, Bourdain: the Definitive Oral Biography, and Care and Feeding; and Luke O’Neil, author of the newsletter Welcome to Hell World, and the story collections A Creature Wanting Form and We Had It Coming.

Issue No. 541

An Australian Book Tour
Laurie Woolever

Come to the window
Luke O’Neil

An Australian Book Tour

by Laurie Woolever

Last year, I published a memoir in the U.S. and in Australia. This year I traveled to Sydney, Newcastle and Melbourne to promote it. This was my first time traveling as a representative of an emerging pariah state; I was nervous, but as it turned out, there was no need; everyone I spoke with about the current embattled state of the U.S. government could easily discern between a citizen and their deranged rulers.

A copy of the author's book, CARE AND FEEDING, and a toile-printed plate with very delicious looking serving of lasagne thereupon — My book and Ben Shewry’s lasagne

I’d visited Australia just once before, in 2002, as the assistant to the infamous celebrity chef Mario Batali, who was appearing at the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival. I was young and dumb and thought that surely a handful of Ativan and lashings of white wine consumed at 30,000 feet would cancel out the jet-lagging effects of the punishing flight path I’d taken from Newark to Amsterdam (6 hours), Amsterdam to Singapore (12 hours), and Singapore to Melbourne (6 hours). I landed in Australia with scrambled eggs for brains and remained more or less useless for four of the six days on the ground.

Older, wiser, sober, and no longer obligated to an airline sponsor requiring me to take such a horrible route, I was determined this time to arrive in top form. On the 15-hour flight from Los Angeles to Sydney I wore brand-new pink compression socks, propped my feet up on my backpack, took a sensible quantity of melatonin, activated my noise-canceling headphones and strapped on the absurd-looking neck pillow / hood that is probably the most inadvertently fashionable thing I own, in a Comme des Garçons kind of way.

The author in a grey sweater and tall, elaborate sleeping hood with built-in black eye covering — The travel pillow hood get-up.

Thanks to the little perks of going on a book tour, I was met at the airport by a driver with a name sign who walked me to a spotless black sedan with fresh water bottles and individually wrapped mints in the console; I will never not be grateful for this luxury, should I continue to be so lucky. He told me that his friends who specialize in shuttling first-class Emirates customers from the airport to their hotels had not worked in weeks, because of Trump’s and Netanyahu’s disastrous war-making in the Middle East.

“I’m sorry about our government,” I said, and he was gracious in response. “We are both lucky; we have our lives and our homes, our safety.” He drove me to the Central Business District, where I had been booked into an “apartment hotel” with a full kitchen (range, oven, microwave, toaster) and a washer and dryer that I was free to use at no extra charge.