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Soigné! A recipe for survival. A juicy, sexy, and wise memoir from the “gifted essayist and meditative thinker” ( From telling what it’s like to go blind to confronting the ongoing erosion of time and the mystery of what’s to come, Imagining the occasion of her final day in this life, celebrated food writer and critic Fussell reflects on the people, places, and events of an adventurous life. But she’s not alone. A coyote--an emblem of the wild and all the things one can’t control--stalks her, taking on greater emotional and metaphorical resonance as the day progresses.
About the author
Born in Southern California in 1927,
BETTY FUSSELL grew up in Riverside but lived for most of her life in the New York area. Best known for
The Story of Corn, she is the author of twelve nonfiction books, ranging from biography to cookbooks, food history, and memoir. Her essays on food, travel, and the arts have appeared in scholarly journals, national magazines, and newspapers, including
The New York Times, over the past fifty years. A specialist in Shakespeare, she has taught English and American literature and the history of food and its importance to American culture at colleges and universities across the country. She has lectured to audiences everywhere from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art to Iowa's State Fair.
Her many awards include the IACP's Jane Grigson Award,
Food Arts’s Silver Spoon Award, the James Beard Foundation's Journalism Award, and the Who's Who of Food & Beverage.
Her memoir,
My Kitchen Wars, was performed in Hollywood and New York as a one-woman show by actress Dorothy Lyman. Her most recent book is
Eat, Live, Love, Die: Selected Essays, published in 2016 by Counterpoint Press. She moved back to California to live at Casa Dorinda in Montecito in 2012.
