An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher

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Product Description America's preeminent food writer and culinary grande dame, M.F.K. Fisher has influenced today's finest chefs, culinary writers, and legions of rabid readers and eaters. Fisher's career began in the 1930s and spanned decades, her glittering prose blending musings on food, love, sex, and the pleasures of eating well and reveling in the senses. With her dozens of books including Serve it Forth, Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf and The Gastronomical Me, she  pioneered an entirely new sensibility, daring to suggest that food be enjoyed sensually. In this age of celebrity chefs and "reality" food programming, her essays return the conversation to the simple, often intensely personal experience of food and dining--whether it's a five-course affair or the mysteries of the fried egg sandwich. An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher, through painstaking research and her private papers and correspondence, traces Fisher's own appetites -- both professional and private. We see how she birthed the genre of food writing. We follow her unhappy first marriage, travels through Europe, the United States, and Mexico ... to the suicide of her great love, and later, her brother. The complete saga, a story never fully told in M.F.K. Fisher's autobiographical work, describes the sometimes turbulent, always passionate intersection of food and personal desire. Anne Zimmerman keeps her voracious appetite filled in the city of San Francisco where she lives and writes about food and wine. From Publishers Weekly Zimmerman, a contributor to Culinate.com, explores the privileged yet emotionally turbulent world of the pioneering American food writer Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher. In her sympathetic yet critical biography of the life behind Fisher's celebrated writings, Zimmerman finds a passionate woman defined by "lifelong hungers." Using access to Fisher's private letters and with help from the family, Zimmerman paints Fisher's emotions and discoveries that she realized in those moments where her personality and adventurous palette intersect. "Her desire for food, for love and for attention of any kind, was relentless," writes Zimmerman. "Food helped her understand the world." In turn, Zimmerman's carefully crafted narrative urges readers to connect Fisher's expanding self-awareness to the literary career she built. It also maps the unique tastes Fisher found, then sensuously described along her way from a California childhood to her European (mostly French) and Mexican odysseys; three marriages; and the suicides of her second husband, Tim Parrish, in 1941 followed by that of her brother David a year later. This focused, smart, and engaging view serves MFK Fisher as both culinary writer and cultural icon. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. From Booklist The hunger for more and more insight into the life of M. F. K. Fisher continues unabated. Zimmerman draws on the archives of Fisher�s papers for this detailed account of the early years of the great gastronome and food writer. Although information on Fisher�s youth in Whittier, California, is sketchy and incomplete, the aesthetic pleasures of good eating attracted her early on, and she was able to focus herself on the details of tastes, smells, and colors of just about everything she put in her mouth. College, first in Illinois, then back in California, introduced her to a host of new friends and to her first husband, Al Fisher. Embarking on a honeymoon abroad, they eventually ended up in Dijon, France, which proved to be her spiritual home. Zimmerman details the marriage�s breakup, Fisher�s remarriage, her second husband�s suicide, and her contrarian attitudes about life and love. --Mark Knoblauch Review "Fisher's hopeless struggle for happiness and her soap opera-worthy love life - as well as Zimmerman's careful attention to detail and suspenseful pacing - will keep readers turning these pages."-- Sarah Halzack, The Washin