How to Cook A Coyote
The Joy of Old Age
-
- $17.99
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
Soigné! A recipe for survival. A juicy, sexy, and wise memoir from the “gifted essayist and meditative thinker” that captures the urgency of life at the age of ninety-eight (The New York Times)
From telling what it’s like to go blind to confronting the ongoing erosion of time and the mystery of what’s to come, How to Cook a Coyote recounts a decade of change as the celebrated food writer and critic Betty Fussell moves from Manhattan to the Montecito retirement community where Julia Child once resided. As Fussell recalls family, friends, enemies, and lovers with wry humor, affection, and a sharp-eyed confrontation with mortality, all the while, the coyote watches. An emblem of the wild and her metaphor for all the things one can’t control—this coyote stalks her, taking on greater emotional and metaphorical resonance as the days progress.
Ultimately this exciting new work from an incomparable voice in American writing provides a recipe for how to enjoy each moment as if it were the last day of your life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
