Conversations with M.F.K. Fisher

the long version

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.