Anthony Bourdain — chef, author of many books including Kitchen Confidential, and host of travel shows Parts Unknown and No Reservations — has died at age 61 of apparent suicide.

I am not a person prone to having emotions about celebrities; it’s hard for me to feel an intimate sadness when people I don’t know personally die. But Bourdain’s death startled me like a slap across the face. Kitchen Confidential, now almost 20 years old, is a book most people remember as a foul-mouthed tirade against eating fish on Monday and specials with thick, concealing sauces. For me, it was the book that almost single-handedly made me a chef — motivation, warning, training. Bourdain was a gifted writer who described frankly the missteps in his career, the cheats and pranks, his struggles with heroin, the pressure-boiler of the kitchen and the weirdos, immigrants and hardasses that it was filled with. The chapter titles “Food is Good,” “Food is Sex,” “Food is Pain,” sum up professional cookery as succinctly and completely as Michael Pollan’s adage, “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants,” describes how we should eat.

While Kitchen Confidential — and his earlier pulp fiction — was written early in the mornings before grinding through restaurant shifts, Bourdain was a natural host for travel shows once he gave up the day job, winning a Peabody and several Emmys for Parts Unknown. He was an adventurous eater, sensitive traveller and interested in visiting places that are often overlooked by bougie food tourism (or in general), like Detroit, Iran, Antarctica and Cuba. For Americans of a sufficient age, Vietnam and the legacy of the war looms large: Bourdain described his first visit to Vietnam as “life-changing” and during several episodes went out of his way to show the battlegrounds and effects of the war, as well as the nation’s recovery.

Bourdain was an outspoken advocate for refugees and immigrants, especially the Hispanic and Latino people that were his coworkers and form the backbone of the American food industry, and criticized the working conditions in the food industry. Lately, he’s been a vocal ally for #MeToo, in support of his girlfriend Asia Argento. He spoke out against Harvey Weinstein, Quentin Tarantino (for his complicity) and James Corden (for his light-hearted Weinstein rape jokes), and criticized chefs Mario Batali and John Besh for sexual harassment and assault. More than that, he open-mindedly questioned what he could’ve done to better support women in the industry and change the macho chef culture.

Bourdain died in France, working on an episode of Parts Unknown. In a way, that at least seems to make cyclical sense to me. He wrote generously about his childhood summers in France, visiting cousins in Normandy and begging English copies of Tintin from his parents in Paris. The way French food first underwhelmed him and then changed him: his first oyster, glistening and fresh, eaten dripping over the gunwale of the boat. He wrote about retracing his steps years later with his brother, revisiting their old holiday cottage as adults. Things come around.

A full eulogy for Bourdain is beyond my skill or scope. He was an immense presence in my life through his writings and television and the closest thing to a professional mentor I had. Described by the Peabody Award judges as, “irreverent, honest, curious, never condescending, never obsequious,” I’ll let him finish in his own words, from the end of Kitchen Confidential:

“It’s been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost.

“But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”