Happier, Stupider Times: Anthony Bourdain's Provincetown Years

A24, 2026, hardcover, 216 pages, 20.3 x 25.4 cm

“I learned every important lesson, all the most important lessons of my life, as a dishwasher.”

Anthony Bourdain arrived in 1970s Provincetown with big ideas about becoming a writer and zero experience working in kitchens. Then he started washing dishes and quickly fell in with “the pirate elite”—the cooks, artists, and partiers who defined the anything-goes lifestyle of summers in P-town. Happier, Stupider Times is a sunwashed trip to the place and time that shaped Bourdain’s formative years, from the fishermen at the port to the culinary traditions and swashbuckling nightlife.