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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 921 FISHER | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
The second volume of reminiscences by one of America's best-loved writers, now in paperback. The book reveals Fisher's "magnificent resilience, the comfort she took from daily writing, her marvelous powers of observation and humor, and, of course, her lifelong attractions to good food and drink."--San Francisco Chronicle. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Author Notes
Born July 3, 1908, in Albion, Michigan, M.F.K Fisher was raised primarily in Whittier, California, where she enjoyed cooking meals for her family. Encouraged in literary pursuits by her parents, she combined her favorite pastimes-cooking and writing-and began writing about cooking as early as 1929 when she moved to Dijon, France, with her first husband, Alfred Fisher.
Fisher was educated at Illinois College, Occidental College, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the University of Dijon. She has written under the names Mary Frances Parrish, Victoria Bern, and Victoria Berne. A prolific author, her work is primarily autobiography and memoir. Her long list of publications includes Dubious Honors (1988) and Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me: Journals and Stories, 1933-1945, (1993). She also contributed articles to widely known magazines, including the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Gourmet.
Fisher died of Parkinson's disease on June 22, 1992, in Glen Ellen, California.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The introduction by her sister states that Fisher, who died at age 83 in 1992, pulled these eclectic choices together to complete her earlier memoirs, To Begin Again . Culled from journals, correspondences and short stories, these were intended to describe Fisher's life ``as it really happened to her and as she felt it at the time,'' according to Barr. After their fruitful years in France, Fisher and her husband Al rode out the bleak Depression years with their families in California. They later traveled in Switzerland in the company of their friend, Dillwyn (``Timmy'') Parrish, but the threesome broke up when the author and Parrish fell in love. In 1937, after her divorce from Al, the two married, but their union was ill-fated: intolerable pain from an incurable disease drove Parrish to suicide in 1941. The elegantly earthy style of the book is familiar, as is Fisher's theme: the need for good food and love. But as in the title story about the narrator's meeting with an alcoholic friend and her wealthy lesbian lover, there is a certain chilly distance to the narrator's descriptions of the disintegration of her once sparkling boarding school chum, one which hints at a ruthless persona not often seen in the usually wise and witty Fisher. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Even fans of the late, bright gastronomic memoirist (d. 1992) might be tiring of all the tributes to her that have been gushing forth, as well as of the incidental jottings and recycled reminiscences by her that publishers have been serving forth during the past few years. But whatever their reaction to last year's collection of Fisher's snippets on her childhood and adolescence, To Begin Again, readers will likely be moved by this less artful, more coherent account couched in diary entries, letters, and some retrospective notes. Fisher touches here on life with her first husband, Al, in their native California, after their idyllic and much chronicled two-year honeymoon in France; then on an odd stretch back in Europe with both Al and ``Tim,'' the man who would be her second husband. Most affecting, though, are entries from her four years with Tim, most of them dominated by his long, painful illness that ended in suicide. Fisher's writing to date, for all its sensual-autobiographical content, has been naggingly evasive about her personal life. But here she writes with directness and genuine emotion, not to impress an audience but to console herself. Less remarkable in isolation than Fisher's early works, perhaps, but affecting to those who have come to know through those writings the author's more cheerful, made-up face. This glimpse behind the lipstick is a fitting wrap-up, then--one that brings depth and dimension to the body of Fisher's work.
Booklist Review
Renowned for her piquant books about food, France, beauty, and sadness, Fisher wrote about her experiences without revealing the more intimate and harrowing aspects of her unusual life. Just before her death in 1992, Fisher decided to lift the veil and compiled a two-volume memoir of previously unpublished short stories, journal entries, and letters. The first volume, To Begin Again, was published last year, and this one picks up where it left off. These were pivotal years for the lovely, observant, sensual, and discerning expatriate. Fisher had just started to test her literary mettle when the whole world went awry. Her first marriage was withering on the vine; the Nazis were flexing their muscles and eyeing her beloved Paris; and Fisher found herself involved with a close friend of her husband's. She and Dillwyn Parrish each went through the thorny process of divorce so that they could be together, but soon after their marriage, Parrish was stricken with an excruciatingly painful circulatory disease. As they coped with a relentless and ultimately hopeless series of medical treatments, Fisher learned to write through her sorrow and began to develop the crisp but knowing voice, and tender respect for the human condition, that made her famous. ~--Donna Seaman
Library Journal Review
These diaries and autobiographical sketches continue To Begin Again ( LJ 10/15/92), but here the gold of Fisher's early life has turned to lead. Stay Me records the disintegration of her first marriage, to Al Fisher, and the brief duration of her second, to their mutual friend Dillwyn Parrish, who is soon driven to suicide by incurable illness. Judging by her diaries, Fisher was a born writer, honest and precise if offhand, whose later categorization as a ``food writer'' obscured the true size of her talent. This memoir is not the place to begin reading her--it is too much the record of an inner journey--but those who have read her other works will welcome it. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/93.-- Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
