“My wife gave me a thousand chances to make it right.” He underestimated his own ambition, he wrote, and “the strange dependence I would come to have surrounding all the attention and the merry-go-round of being a public person.” “I wasn’t there for my wife, and I wasn’t there for my son,” he wrote in an email. It had the opposite effect, especially as his career took off. He was leaving the restaurant business and starting a career in food media, a shift he thought the would allow him more time to be a family man. They met 18 years ago at a cookware store in Minneapolis and married two years later. Zimmern is bracingly frank about where his marriage went wrong. The split is difficult but amicable, they say.
