by Susannah Indigo
(7/12/00)

This scene is from Fisher's I Was Really Very Hungry, featured in As They Were, a collection of her essays. It speaks to her most important theme: that the art of seduction is closely related to the art of knowing yourself well, and that both of them are best developed by living your life boldly, awakened to your senses. There is nothing sexier than a person who is confident in their tastes and desires, who lives comfortably in their own skin, and who revels in the grace and detail of sensual pleasures like good food and fine wine. Anyone who writes well about these arts becomes one of my favorite authors.

M.F.K. Fisher wrote twenty-eight books, primarily about food and "the art of eating." She was good at titles -- How To Cook A Wolf, I Was Really Very Hungry, An Alphabet for Gourmets, The Gastronomical Me -- but they all had the same theoretical subtitle: How To Master The Art of Seductive Living.

Vivid, sensual, voluptuous - these are the words most often used to describe Fisher, both in her writing and her life. She was "a poet of the appetites," John Updike said, a seductress of the senses and an inspiration for many. A number of fan pages have been devoted to her on the Web, including www.mfkfisher.org .

When asked why she chose to write mostly about food and not loftier subjects, Fisher would reply, "The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it...and then it is all one."

Fisher was a beautiful young woman when she first traveled to France to begin her sensual and intellectual awakening; later in life she appeared an elegant, intimidating, striking silver-haired matron, taking refuge in her final years in the temperate hills of Northern California's wine country, often writing about the process of aging, until her death in 1992 at the age of eighty-four.

In Long Ago In France, her memoir of youth and food and love and discovery, Fisher reminds me of Hemingway writing on Paris in the twenties in A Moveable Feast -- both writing about a powerful time in their lives long after it was over, where everything reads a bit too perfect and wonderful to be true. In fact, Fisher's daughter, Kennedy Golden, wrote recently of her mother that "she always made our life bigger than it was." But Fisher's evocation of Dijon in 1929, her description of the birth of her European reverence for the table, and her self-amused, intimate tales of hunger and appetites and learning to be at home when not at home are simply gorgeous to read. "It was there that I started to grow up, to study, to make love, to eat and to drink, to be me and not what I was expected to be," she wrote of her three years living in France with her new husband while studying at the University of Dijon, and we get to grow up and fall in love with the world right along with her in this book.

Passion, Fisher would say, is the requirement to be an alive and interesting human being. Her personal life was a bit chaotic, suffering through divorces, widowhood, her brother's suicide and her own struggle with depression. Yet passion ruled -- in the sixties she traveled to Mississippi to teach American literature and English composition in an all black school, abhorring the divisiveness of race relations in America. She gave teaching her all, while still reviewing cookbooks on the side for The New Yorker. Eventually she would write a column for them, entitled "Gastronomy Recalled," and this would become the basis for her collection of recipes wrapped up in fine prose, With Bold Knife and Fork.