Before the Food Network, before salsa could be found in diners and Krispy Kremes north of the Mason-Dixon Line, before Ruth Reichl and Anthony Bourdain, Big Night and Babette’s Feast, nouvelle cuisine and organic produce, the Silver Palate and the Moosewood, and long, long before America discovered it wasn’t supposed to like Wonder Bread, writer M.F.K. Fisher published her first book praising the pleasures of the table. Before any of us lived in an America that took food seriously, Fisher wrote fierce, brilliant prose about the dignity and importance of human hungers. “She spit Puritan restraint out like a dull wine,” declared Molly O’Neill in the New York Times in 1990. The subject of her 24 or 25 books (it’s hard to pin down an exact number with so much anthologizing and reprinting) was Fisher herself; food was her door into the world of memory, emotion, and experience.
She is also a cult writer, despite her visibility. Readers either know every word she wrote or are not quite sure who she is. Much of her work appeared first in popular magazines like the New Yorker, House Beautiful, and Gourmet, but collections of those pieces have not stayed in print. She sailed through her publishing life with the highest of book-jacket praise–“I do not know of anyone in the United States today who writes better prose” (W.H. Auden); “She writes about food as others do about love, but rather better” (Clifton Fadiman)–but until recently, by virtue of their sheer unclassifiability, her books were still hard to find in stores. (One must start at minimum in the cookbook, travel, biography, and essay sections.)
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In 1984 Parnassus Imprints published Reardon’s book Oysters: A Culinary Celebration (rereleased in 2000 by Lyons Press). While working on it she lived part-time near Boston. She began using the Schlesinger Library Culinary Collection at Harvard, which includes the papers of both Fisher and Julia Child. She also joined several organizations: the New England Women’s Culinary Guild, the Culinary Historians of Boston, the Boston chapter of the American Institute of Wine and Food. Through those associations she met Child, and in 1983 she struck up a correspondence with Fisher, whose writing she’d first encountered when it was solicited for a literary journal at Barat and whose book Consider the Oyster she calls “the best book on oysters, ever.”
Reardon was originally wary about writing the biography. When she first visited Fisher in 1987 to interview her for Pleasures of the Table, the writer asked her, “Oh my dear, why don’t you just write about me?” Reardon’s first reaction was “no way. I don’t ever want to get involved in this. Simply because of the number of places she lived, the number of people in her life, the number of lovers and husbands she had, the number of books she [wrote].” But she continued to research Fisher for Pleasures of the Table.
If Reardon was sanguine about compiling the necessary information, separating the storytelling from the facts, she was surprised by how difficult it was to resist the allure of Fisher’s prose. “What I did not anticipate was how difficult it was going to be to get outside of that.” Reardon has had to fight against a proscribed pattern of refutations: this is how Fisher said it happened, this is what really happened, “which ends up being kind of a boring thing….You can’t be caught in that trap. The challenge is to find a way to tell the story without in a sense pretending what she says isn’t there.” Reardon mentions as an example Fisher’s Dijon landladies in The Gastronomical Me, the subjects of some of Fisher’s most rounded and evocative prose: “The way she describes those landladies and such is so wonderful”–yet impossible to fact-check.
Although the biographer’s possible dramatic disclosures–deaths and affairs and unplanned pregnancies–are pretty standard fare for the genre, it’s the potential small revelations that worry a Fisher fanatic. That those transformative moments were spent eating beans, not peas; that they weren’t Pernods she and Timmy drank on the Normandie but pink gins; that the incident with Maritza and the grape skins in her navel never happened. But the truth of these things might matter less than readers think. A biography, while perhaps changing our view of her, cannot undercut her power, because the lessons from Fisher about living well–about feeding our hungers kindly in the face of the “dread fact” that we must do so–lie in the end in her gifts as a writer. She had the ability, as T.S. Eliot said about Philip Larkin, to make words do what she wanted.
