An Extravagant Hunger

January 31, 2011
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.

February 1, 2011
The hunger for more and more insight into the life of M. F. K. Fisher continues unabated. Zimmerman draws on the archives of Fishers papers for this detailed account of the early years of the great gastronome and food writer. Although information on Fishers 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 marriages breakup, Fishers remarriage, her second husbands suicide, and her contrarian attitudes about life and love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)