M. F. K. Fisher

"I have never seen any reason to be dull," writes M. F. K. Fisher in To Begin Again, "and since I was less than four I have enjoyed entertaining and occasionally startling anyone who may be listening." From those first stories told at the family dinner table she has continued to startle and entertain new generations of readers over the decades of her long and interesting life. She ostensibly writes about food, but while doing so Fisher created a genre, another way to talk passionately about all the hungers and satisfactions of the human heart. W. H. Auden called her "the best prose writer in America." Throughout her career Fisher made it a practice to circle back, returning often to her past in memoirs, stories, and journals. Less interested in the facts, perhaps, than in the truth that lies behind them, To Begin Again provides us with a new portrait of her early years, from her family's migration to California in 1912 to her first marriage in 1929. Some pieces were written as early as 1927, some as recently as 1990. All are suffused with her trademark wit, intelligence, and insight. Fisher speaks here of the people and events which first shaped her finely tuned and lasting appetites. During these years of "learning to live well gastronomically" she spent several rugged summers with Aunt Gwen, catching and frying fresh rock bass, carrying fried-egg sandwiches "greasily in our pockets on our long treks in every direction of that wild deserted country." This was when the young Fisher first felt the value of being nurtured in body and soul. Later, during sensual family dinners free of the dietary strictures normally imposed by her absent grandmother, Fisher began to wonder about happiness and "how it seemed to be connected with open enjoyment of even a badly prepared dish that could be tasted without censure of the tasting." From the first glimpse of the precocious nineteen-year-old, keenly observant and eager for freedom, through the rich remembrances of Fisher in old age, To Begin Again offers great rewards.

Here are twenty treasures from M. F. K. Fisher. Written over the years, laced with new reflections and asides, these pieces (some never before published) are among the most entrancing that we have yet had from this rare and magical writer. She writes of growing up in Whittier, California, of secret palaces (a six-year-old's delight in "the wonderland of quiet elegance" of a Los Angeles ice cream parlor and in the plush, cool grandeur of the Mission Inn beyond the neighboring hills and vinyards) and of private ghettoes (the isolation of being the only Episcopalian family in an enclave of Quakers). She relives the pangs of young hunger at the hands of loving but parsimonious godparents and the blissful torpor, years later, of being overfed by a mad waitress in a famous Burgundian inn. She recalls the trance-like feeling of putting out to sea, the intimacy and languor of life on a freighter, and the antics of fellow passengers. And she celebrates the gaudy splendor of the Gare de Lyon. ("No other station in the world manages so mysteriously to cloak with compassion the anguish of departure and the dubious ecstasies of return and arrival.") She re-creates the sensuous rhythm of days spent in two ancient kitchens in Provence, "each with its own smells, its own views into that world and into myself," and she conjures up all the erratic, explosive, and musical street scenes that measure her days one winter in the Rue Brueys in Aix. "Anything can be a lodestar in a person's life," M. F. K. Fisher writes - and here in this surprising collection we encounter particularly diverse and delightful points of reference - from faucets that spout red and white wine in the master bedrooms of a Dijon hotel to a primitive Provençal cure for warts to the sounds of the eucalyptus dying outside her house in the Sonoma Valley. To read this book is to enter into the memories of M. F. K. Fisher - places, images, feelings, flavors, encounters that have played a mysterious part in the shaping of an extraordinary writer.

"Moment of wisdom -- Answer in the affirmative -- The weather within -- The unswept emptiness -- Another love story -- The second time around -- the lost, strayed, stolen -- the reunion -- the oldest man -- a question answered -- diplomatic, retired -- mrs. teeter's tomato jar -- a kitchen allegory -- a delayed meeting -- notes on a necessary pact.

This collection of interviews captures the conversations of a writer about whom the Chicago Sun-Times says, "She is to literary prose what Sir Laurence Olivier is to acting or Willie Mays is to baseball." These interviews reveal M.F.K. Fisher's fierce wit and her uncompromising and frequently contradictory attitudes toward the luxuries and necessities of gastronomy - the idea that sensual appreciation, in all aspects of life, is or should be necessary. In her conversations Fisher often returns to the complexities of her own life - the people and places she has loved: Dijon in the l930s, with its irrepressible and colorful chefs and landladies; her classically late-Victorian mother who lived much of her mature life as an invalid; Rex, Fisher's father, whose newspaper ethics and integrity influenced her work; her three husbands, with special attention to the painter Dillwyn Parrish, her great love, whose illness and suicide shortly before the suicide of Fisher's younger brother so shaped her complex view of detachment. Other recurring subjects in these interviews include the nature of aging, the differences between men and women, and Fisher's relationship with her work, which she describes with precision and a selective memory. These pieces give us a view of M.F.K. Fisher in motion - speaking and changing her mind at will and unable to tolerate simplistic strategies of thinking and living.

"From the Journals of M.F.K. Fisher combines into one volume three acclaimed collections of journals, correspondence, and short stories, the earliest piece written when Fisher was nineteen and the last composed shortly before her death in 1992, at age eighty-three."--BOOK JACKET. "To Begin Again gives us a portrait of Fisher's early years, from her family's migration to California in 1912 to her first marriage in 1929. Here she begins to learn about the art of "living well gastronomically" and acquires an appreciation for the nurturance of both body and soul. Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me presents a candid portrait of the most traumatic period of Fisher's life - her divorce from her husband, her marriage to their friend Dillwyn Parrish, and Parrish's tragic illness and death. Last House offers a wry look at an artist grappling with old age and illness, and a poignant remembrance of the experiences that shaped her life's work."--BOOK JACKET.

"Follows the course of Jennie, a willful, wandering woman, a lovely enchantress calculating the havoc caused by her life of danger and license."

The incomparable M.F.K. Fisher, of whom Auden said, "I do not know of anyone in the United States today who writes better prose," evokes the Marseille she has known and loved for almost fifty years. What she has written, she protests, is not a guidebook; rather, it is an effort "to write something about the town itself, through my own senses." Nevertheless, it is hard to conceive of a guide more fascinating than M.F.K. Fisher as she shares all that she sees and knows and feels about the old port and quays, as she relishes the succulent fruits of the salty soil and the salty sea that embrace Marseille; as she talks with taxi drivers, waivers, concierges, a gabby French doctor, and an Inspector Maigret-like harbor master; as she looks, always, beyond the honky-tonk exteriors of some of the brash modern streets and feels in her bones their ancient sources. The whole human parade fascinates her-the jugglers, the fortunetellers, the pimps, the hollow-chested Pinball Boys, the She-Wolf barkers who intimidate tourists into their fishhouses. Through her eyes we perceive as part of the essential fabric of this cradle of civilization the aspects of the town that so horrify Anglo-Saxons. "Ports are places of traffic," she notes, and since ancient times this port of ports has been trading in everything from olive oil and salt to white slaves and heroin-in fact, "In most of our human commodities since before Protis, the Phocean, went there in about 600 B.C." Mrs. Fisher scans the centuries, evoking the days of the great slave galleys, the horrors of the Plague. But she finds "this collective evil balanced by a wonderful healthiness," and it is to this that she instinctively responds as she probes the indestructible nature of the Marseilles people or glories in the light-blazing basilica of Notre Dame de la Garde on the promontory, "the Good Mother of all navigators." M.F.K. Fisher gives us what is in many ways her most profound and searching book, as she reflects upon and rediscovers this mysterious, indefinable place that has meant so much to her over the years. A Considerable Town will delight, surprise, and nourish all of her readers-those who have long been addicted to M.F.K. Fisher's work, those who have recently discovered her, as well as those who many be making her acquaintance for the first time.

In 1929, a newly married M.F.K. Fisher said goodbye to a milquetoast American culinary upbringing and sailed with her husband to Dijon, where she tasted real French cooking for the first time. The Gastronomical Me is a chronicle of her passionate embrace of a whole new way of eating, drinking, and celebrating the senses. As she recounts memorable meals shared with an assortment of eccentric and fascinating characters, set against a backdrop of mounting pre-war tensions, we witness the formation not only of her taste but of her character and her prodigious talent.

From Amazon: Written to inspire courage in those daunted by wartimes shortages, How to Cook a Wolf continues to rally cooks during times of plenty, reminding them that providing sustenance requires more than putting food on the table. M. F. K. Fisher knew that the last thing hungry people needed were hints on cutting back and making do. Instead, she gives her readers license to dream, to experiment, to construct adventurous and delicious meals as a bulwark against a dreary, meager present. Her fine prose provides reason in itself to draw our chairs close to the hearth; we can still enjoy her company and her exhortations to celebrate life by eating well.

A compilation of personal letters creates an autobiography of the author of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" through his correspondence with other literary luminaries, including T.S. Eliot and Henry Miller, as well as letters to complete strangers.

Fisher first envisioned Last House as an anthology of interesting stories and useful tips. But as age and illness took their toll, this compilation became a testament to her will to continue writing and is a wry, candid portrait of an artist grappling with growing older. Named after the house she lived in for more than twenty years, Last House is also a frank, touching examination of the experiences that shaped her life's work. Fisher relives the "white wine" trips she and her family took to Guadalajara and Marseille; she ponders the connection between an appreciation of food and love; she remembers the splendor and magic of the Paris she visited as a young girl, and again as a student and a young wife. Most significantly, Fisher explores the craft of writing and the importance of a writer's independence.