KEEP OUT. CROSS FIRE. RIFLE RANGES.
The sign was unequivocal, but no one, it seems, kept out. During the last years of M.F.K. Fisher’s life, an increasing number of the reverent and the curious ignored the warning, bouncing down a rutted one-lane road to a little pink-and-white stucco house with a shingled roof. There, they shuffled respectfully into the presence of a reed-thin, gray-haired woman with a crackly voice and piercing wit, recording her words, noting her thoughts, and making her thoroughly uncomfortable with their praise.
On the eve of her 82nd birthday, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher had become, much to her surprise, an institution. But the greatest food writer of all was not a food writer at all. Her books are filled with stories, not recipes; her ingredients are people and emotions, not flour and sugar. Food is a metaphor for human passion, and writing about meals a way to illuminate relationships, hopes, and desires. “Her subject matter matters not at all,” said Jack Shoemaker, former editor-in-chief of North Point Press, the Berkeley firm that re-published many of her books during the 1980s. “North Point was interested in her as a literary stylist. She writes exquisitely well, and only secondarily about food.”
From 1970, Fisher lived in the Valley of the Moon, a few miles north of the town of Sonoma, on a ranch owned by her friend David Pleydell-Bouverie, an architect who designed and built her house. When I rang her bell, we were ushered into her bedroom office, a long, narrow room with a wood stove at the center of one wall. Red-painted bookshelves, crammed full, lined the alcove around the stove. The shiny black vinyl tile covering the floor imitated Spanish ceramic. Near the door stood a nondescript wooden desk, heaped with papers; at the other end of the room was a hospital-type bed, with two mobiles slowly twisting above it. The brown summer pastures radiated heat, but the room was cool.
M.F.K. Fisher was eating her breakfast — “My two weekly eggs,” she said, “poached.” She sat in a big brown armchair in the center of the room, her back to the arched window that framed the mountains to the east. In a floor-length orange velour robe that zipped up the front and bright red socks — no shoes — she looked jaunty and regal. Her hair was cut short, and her brows penciled into the same skinny arches she wore all her life, though the arch on the right brow was a bit wobbly. There was a dab of jade green eye shadow at the corner of each eye.
