Review by Booklist Review
Fussell may be 98 years old and losing her vision, but the feisty food writer can still see life clearly. She says she's living a "life without a future," making the past and present all that more important. In this series of essays, the author recalls past loves, old friendships, and an adventurous life. Fussell is not afraid to name names and dish dirt (luckily she has outlived many of her subjects). These days, Fussell admits to a "coyote" lurking in the background and watching her as she moves around her "old folks home." This coyote represents death, and Fussell faces off squarely with its shadow. Many of her books include recipes, and in this one, the author proposes a tongue-in-cheek coyote pie recipe with a cornmeal crust and coyote meat filling. Life in the home brings a lively group of friends to share talks and outings, but the group is slowly diminishing. Fussell writes bravely about her limited future, still showing her sharp wit and keen sense of irony. She's a bright example of savoring life and aging with grace.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Essayist and food writer Fussell (Eat, Live, Love, Die) serves up a spirited meditation on aging and mortality in this vibrant memoir. Interspersing the account with chapters that detail the process of baking coyote pie ("Mine won't be the only life we feast on tonight"), Fussell reflects on what it means to grow old while refusing to fade quietly. Born in Riverside, Calif., in 1927, Fussell writes buoyantly of a life--from her years at Pomona College to her marriage and eventual divorce from writer Paul Fussell--shaped by academic achievement, literary ambition, and personal reinvention. As the book's timeline progresses, she confronts without self-pity the indignities of aging, including glaucoma, physical frailty, and the deaths of her friends. "I mean to walk out of this life with a wink and a grin," she writes, "no matter how it happens." She calls on readers to live fully and fearlessly, reinvigorating those clichés with a unique blend of lyricism and irreverence (as when she admires while making broth how the chickens' "beaked heads bobble on top of the boiling pot, seeming to sleep sweetly on a bed of claws"). It's a graceful, gutsy ode to the pleasures and pains of growing old. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins/Loomis. (Dec.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Entering her 98th year, James Beard Award-winning food writer and cookbook author Fussell (The Story of Corn) offers a memoir and meditation on aging that addresses readers directly. It follows up her 1999 memoir My Kitchen Wars, which focused on her childhood and early adulthood, in addition to candid revelations about her divorce. In her new book, she writes about what it's like to lose one's eyesight, confronts the afterlife, and talks about friendships, lovers, travel, mythos, and family. The memoir's friendly tone might remind readers of spending time with a grandparent, with lessons on enjoying each moment as if it were the last. Throughout, Fussell deploys the coyote as a motif: a creature that stalks and waits as one goes about their life--perhaps a symbol of death. Of course, Fussell also offers recipes, for Coyote Pie and a Smiley Coyote Cocktail. Her funny and wise book is a good reminder that although the body may age, that doesn't mean one has to grow up. VERDICT An excellent addition for fans of Fussell or those who want to learn the lessons of someone who has lived a long, full life.--Autumn West
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The noted food writer contemplates life as she nears the century mark. Born in the Los Angeles area in 1927, Fussell has been living in a retirement home in Santa Barbara, California, for a decade, having finally gotten away from New York, where she'd made her name as a food writer and critic. From that vantage point, "the one place in California where mountains run east to west along the sea to leave a strip so narrow there's no land left for the ticky-tacky developers who gulped down my earlier home and spat out the Inland Empire," she remembers a life very well lived. Perhaps surprisingly, a good part of her narrative concerns lovers past and sex generally gone (though she does admit to a continuing interest in it); a tiny bit of venom is reserved for her ex-husband, the noted literary historian Paul Fussell, though more is directed toward Fussell's next wife, who, she writes, "estranged Paul from his own children and disinherited them by shifting their promised inheritance to her own children." The title's promised recipe materializes bit by bit throughout Fussell's elegant and often funny narrative; thankfully, it seems mostly a metaphor (though one with tasting notes, suggesting that the meat of a California coyote in the suburbs would have "a hint of small dog or cat"). More direct are Fussell's observations on what happens as one ages, when life becomes a sequence of pill-taking rituals, "an exact sequence of steps, no improvisation allowed," and the sad fact that our elders "become all but invisible" to the outside world. Another lamentable reality is the constant loss of friends, with her coffee klatsch now on its second set of members. Yet Fussell is stout-hearted and happy throughout, even as she notes "how weird it is to live without a future." A pleasure to read, although, as Fussell warns, we know how it's going to end. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
