Propped against the wall was a half-ruined painting that Fisher bought in a junk shop in Zurich in 1936 or so. The painting, which gave Fisher’s book Sister Age its name and is described in the introduction, brought me up short. Fisher said that everything she wrote was “strictly true, every word of it.” Somehow, though, I’d always “believed” her stories the way one “believes” a good work of fiction; I’d never thought that it was possible to write of real things with such pristine clarity. Others have felt the same confusion; Jack Shoemaker of North Point Press said he collected her stories for years under the impression that they were beautifully crafted fiction.
M.F.K. Fisher was born Mary Frances Kennedy in Albion, Michigan, on July 3, 1908, the first child of fourth-generation newspaperman Rex Kennedy and his wife Edith. Her father — who had threatened to name her Independencia if she’d been born a day later — purchased the Whittier Daily News in Southern California when she was four and moved the family there. In her memoir, Among Friends, she wrote of a California now lost, of Whittier lush with orchards and climbing vines, and of Laguna Beach when the Pacific Coast Highway petered out along the shoreline cliffs. “I sweated blood over that book,” she said. “I have an unusually good memory, I think. I decided I was going to write it as it was, not as it must have been.”
Fisher married three times: to Al Fisher, her companion during student days in Dijon in the early ‘30s; to painter and novelist Dillwyn Parrish, called Chexbres in her books, with whom she spent idyllic years in Switzerland before his suicide; and to publisher Donald Friede, whom she divorced after giving birth to two daughters. “I was astonished when I found I could and should earn my living as a writer. It scared me silly,” she said. “I found out the hard way, by having children and having to support them.”
She chose to write memoirs not because she felt a need to tell the world her life, but because “it’s the only thing I know. I realized that I would have to write about myself all the time, because I’m the person I know best.”
“It’s sort of an odd, exposed feeling, but I never did it to be exposed,” she said. “Some people say you should never write a diary unless you want someone to read it. I’ve never agreed with that. I’ve always kept diaries going, two or three at a time. Different parts of me, you know. I wouldn’t want anyone to read them, but my only way of being me is to write it, I guess. Not for publication, ever.”
