“Portrait of MFK Fisher” (14″x23″ framed. oil pencils, watercolor, and pastels)
MFK Fisher (1908-1992)
“When I write about hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth, and the love of it…and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied.”
—MFK Fisher,. 1954
“Possibly the most private thing in the world is an egg until it is broken”
Fisher remains (and this is an opinion I gather many of her conflicted fans share) the Bette Davis of Food writing….wildly talented in unexpected ways, regularly cross-grained, occasionally self-serving, chronically curious, intimidatingly disciplined, and (somehow above all, at least for me) inescapably feminine.
Basically (and, once again, perhaps only as far as I’m concerned) she’s on the same list as Flannery O’Connor and Muriel Spark……when folks, hearing that I’ve read and admired every single available word the woman’s published, ask “Wouldn’t you just LOVE to have dinner with her one night??!!!”, my first response is “That’s the LAST person I would ever want to spend an evening with. It would be disastrous.”
All done and said?… If I were asked to give a critical assessment of MFK Fisher, I’d simply paraphrase the old-song lyrics, and I’d type “She may have been a headache, but she never was a bore….”