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

Zimmerman, Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582435464 ISBN 13: 9781582435466

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2011

Synopsis

In An Extravagant Hunger, time slows and is relished, and the turning points and casual strolls of M.F.K. Fisher's life are unwrapped and savored. From the Berengaria that washed her across the sea to France in 1929, to Le Paquis, the Swiss estate that later provided a backdrop for some of the most idyllic and fleeting moments of her life, the stories of Fisher's love for food and her love for family and men are meticulously researched and exquisitely captured in this book. Exploring Fisher's lonely and formative time in Europe with her first husband; her subsequent divorce and re–marriage to her creative sparkplug, Dillwyn Parrish, and his tragic suicide; and the child she carried from an unnamed father, the story of M.F.K. Fisher's life becomes as vibrant and passionate as her prolific words on wine and cuisine.



Letters and journal entries piece together a dramatic life, but An Extravagant Hunger steps further, bridging the gaps between personal notes and her public persona, filling in the silences by offering an engaging and unprecedented depth of intuitive commentary. With a passion of her own, Anne Zimmerman is the careful witness, lingering beside M.F.K. Fisher through her most dramatic and productive years.

About this title

About the Author

Anne Zimmerman keeps her voracious appetite filled in the city of San Francisco where she lives and writes about food and wine.

She was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, attended Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, and received a Master's degree from San Diego State University. A West Coast girl, she's lived in Portland, Seattle, and San Diego.

When not writing, she scours the internet and flip through my piles of cookbooks and past Gourmet Magazines, making lists of things to cook and bake. She insists on reading the printed version of the New York Times whenever possible, and she always sends thank-you notes.

Reviews

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.)
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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

Edition details

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1582435464
• ISBN 13: 9781582435466
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352