Falling Upwards: Living the Dream, One Panic Attack at a Time

Restaurateur Fall exposes the underside of the nightlife industry in a captivating debut memoir that traces his own meteoric career and concurrent attempts to come to grips with a debilitating anxiety disorder. Fall found early success with an ethos of personal transformation (“If you can turn an empty space into Studio 54, why not do that to yourself?”) that helped propel him from a “hairy, broke, pathological liar from a broken home” into a “gatekeeper, tastemaker, Dionysus in black nail polish” who opened his first Los Angeles watering hole at 23 and more than a dozen bars and restaurants by 29. But while this philosophy led to success, it also spurred dissatisfaction, as the “more successful I became, the more removed I was from my sense of self.” A tipping-point panic attack at 29 pushed him to seek help. The author’s healing process involved finding a therapist, reframing the mental narrative surrounding his anxiety, and taking antidepressants, though he advises readers that their own recoveries might look different, as “there are no ‘right’ ways to be happy and successful other than the ones your intuition is pulling you towards.” With unvarnished honesty, Fall renders his attempts to heal amid a pressure-cooker service industry culture, rife with media-reinforced stereotypes of angry, knife-throwing “bad-boy chefs,” which can leave little space for emotional vulnerability. It’s a raw and riveting account. (Sept.)