[Wineapple is an American educator, critic, and biographer. In the following review of To Begin Again, she provides an account of her personal acquaintance with Fisher and an overview of the author's life.]

M.F.K. Fisher changed my life. Not in direct, obvious ways: her ways, like her prose, are subtle, graceful and not a little mischievous.

I first spoke with her almost eight years ago when researching a biography of Janet Flanner, the New Yorker's longtime Paris correspondent. I had known that the two women were first acquainted in the summer of 1966, when Fisher was in Paris writing on the foods of the world for Time-Life. She was then 58, author of some eight books on the art of eating and translator of Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste. But though W.H. Auden had just called her "America's greatest writer," she was, in her own words, a comparative unknown. And she was nervous: although she'd been in Paris many times before 1966, never before had she been completely on her own.

Seventy-four-year-old Janet Flanner, Fisher's neighbor in an attic room at the Hotel Continental, took care of that. "Janet was much spryer than I," Mary Frances recalled in her introduction to The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, "but was used to deputizing her many disciples, so that I spent most of that summer happily puffing around Paris on errands for her, fending off her fans at concerts, sampling a new batch of Sancerre in a cool cellar under the Luxembourg, with an ancient vintner she had known for countless years." "Janet exhausted me," Mary Frances Fisher told me by telephone, "but I loved her."

Several phone calls and a few months later, I set off from the San Francisco airport in my small rented car, maps and directions strewn over the front seat. (Remember every morsel you eat, begged a friend of mine.) I drove through California's lush Sonoma Valley looking for the Smokey the Bear sign she used as a landmark for the many visitors to her home. Mary Frances would not hear of my staying in a motel or an inn. I was to be her guest for several days while interviewing her reclusive friend, Hildegarde Flanner, Janet Flanner's sister, who lived across the mountains in the Napa Valley. I was to tell Mary Frances everything.

Flattered, nervous, even a bit suspicious, I hardly knew what to expect. Neither, I learned, did she. Minutes after my arrival, she happily confided she'd expected a dried-up, elderly, Eastern academic and was delighted to find me younger and jazzier than she'd imagined. Tall, almost lanky, robed in a bright, flowing caftan, Mary Frances for her part bore slight resemblance to the pictures on the dust-jackets of her books. She was much more regal, her lipstick was redder, her gray-green eyes bluer, and the hint of blond could still be seen in her long white hair, wound to a bun near the top of her head. Her hands were long and graceful, although she said she could no longer control them as much as she liked. Arthritis and Parkinson's disease were taxing all of her physical movements, a fact she mentioned and then dismissed, as if such tiresome infirmities should be lightly tolerated, not indulged.

She gently steered me toward the kitchen table where she'd set out milk and cookies for the elderly academic. The kitchen occupied the entire wall in a large, airy room that also served as living room, reading room, dining room and no doubt writing room. Situated on the rolling grounds of the Bouverie ranch, hidden from the main road and surrounded by yellow wildflowers, her house had been built to her specifications: only two rooms, she'd insisted, a public one and a bedroom joined by a large foyer and the enormous bathroom she'd always coveted. Each room was spacious, the white walls flushed with the color of brightly woven rugs over the tiles, painted Mexican pottery, and desks and tables laden with papers, pens, a small kaleidoscope, photographs, books and galley proofs; she said it seemed as if hundreds of them came every day, begging for her comment.

We drank the crisp white wine produced in the valley and talked long and late over a simple, delicious plate of cold pink shrimp. It was one of those nights, rarer as we grow old, of stories, speculations, confidences. We talked about Janet Flanner and Flanner's sister, about writing, about living alone and about living with others, about two of her three husbands, and about her life in California, Switzerland and France. She mentioned her two daughters, whom she raised more or less on her own, and her first collection of essays, Serve It Forth (1937), which had been encouraged by her second husband Dillwyn Parrish. She was still amused when readers assumed the genderless "M.F.K." to be a man and admits the initials were chosen, in part, because she preferred ambiguity—especially because she wrote about food. (I have written a novel, but it's terrible; I am not a novelist, she insisted.)

Before I went to sleep, I asked why she had extended so much hospitality to me, a stranger, offering bed and board and even her literary agent before she'd even met me face to face. She smiled broadly. I had nothing to lose, she said.

A Californian by choice and disposition, Mary Frances Kennedy was born on July 3, 1908 in Albion, Michigan. "I still feel embarrassed that I was not born a native Californian because I truly think I am one," Fisher admits in To Begin Again, a posthumous collection of stories and memoirs, some written or revised in the last few years and some going back as early as 1927. For those familiar with Fisher's twenty or so other books, To Begin Again is a refreshing reminder of her tonic, unpretentious prose as well as the autobiographical details that often appear in her work.

Mary Frances didn't arrive in the Golden State until she was past two. Her father Rex Kennedy had sold his share in Albion's local newspaper, packed up his well-bred Episcopalian wife Ethel and their two small daughters, and bolted. "[T]he four of us," writes Fisher, "were undoubtedly among the first beatniks of the Far West—unwittingly, of course." Like all good Midwesterners, they aimed for the Pacific. But after speculating on a half-dead orange grove, Rex and Ethel Kennedy decided they'd all fare much better on a steady income in a sturdy house. (One of Fisher's earliest memories is of her small sister sleeping peacefully in the top drawer of a hotel bureau.) Rex bought the Whittier News, the local paper of the small Quaker community in southern California destined for modest renown as the birthplace of Richard Nixon.

Nixon, however, meant as little to the young Mary Frances as the words "smog" or "pollution," all of which had not yet been born. During her childhood the air smelled of dusty eucalyptus, wild mustard and orange; the poppies grew as tall as little girls. Only the stern, self-righteous asceticism of the Whittier Quakers dimmed the otherwise lovely vista of half-wild roses, lupine and sage. "I was never asked inside a Friend's house, in the more than forty years I lived in Whittier," Fisher recollected.

Yet her family never lacked for warmth, companionship, or their own prejudices and arrogance, which Fisher recalls unflinchingly in To Begin Again. She remembers how she taunted her schoolmate Gracie with the casual and unforgettable cruelty of childhood. With her navy-blue hair and a dark complexion the color of a polished hardwood floor, Gracie was an outcast among the pink and white girls of grammar school. And though the young Mary Frances loved Gracie almost as much she loved being pink and white, she blithely ignored Gracie's poverty, she made fun of Gracie's name, she made Gracie cry. "I wonder what ever happened to her," Fisher mused more than a half a century later. "I hope that if she is alive she does not remember me."

Laced with reminiscences, M.F.K. Fisher's books never submit to nostalgia or sentimentality—no matter how green and aromatic was the southern California of yester-year. In this, To Begin Again is no exception. Fisher is a tart writer who, for all her autobiographical urges, does not confess. She keeps a tidy, brisk distance between herself and the objects of her contemplation, whether these be her beloved, democratic father, her sensitive, traditional mother, or her maternal grandmother, a Victorian grande dame who took refuge from the duties of her gender and class in the privileges of a nervous stomach:

The pattern was one they followed like the resolute ladies they were: a period of dogged reproduction, eight or twelve and occasionally sixteen offspring, so that at least half would survive the nineteenth-century hazards of colics and congestions; a period of complete instead of partial devotion to the church, usually represented in the Indian Territory where my grandmother lived by a series of gawky earnest missionaries who plainly needed fattening; and at last the blissful flight from all these domestic and extracurricular demands into the sterile muted corridors of a spa. It did not matter if the place reeked discreetly of sulphur from the baths and singed bran from the diet trays: it was a haven and a reward.

Fisher claims that her grandmother's nervous stomach indirectly accounts for the pleasure she herself began to take in sauces that weren't white, in marshmallows floating in hot chocolate, and in grilled sweetbreads with a dash of sherry on them. When Grandmother retreated to one of her spas, the family rioted in the pleasures of the pantry from which Mary Frances "formed my own firm opinions of where gastronomy should and indeed must operate in any happy person's pattern." Food nourishes the body and the soul. "Increasingly I saw, felt, understood the importance, especially between people who love and trust one another, of a full sharing of one of our three main hungers, which are for food, for love, and for shelter." So why not, Fisher asked herself, enjoy it all?

But it wasn't just Grandmother's Nervous Stomach that inspired Fisher to write about one of our basic hungers and the skills that go into satisfying it. She tells us in To Begin Again that as the oldest child of four, she discovered early the best way to get attention was to cook something, something a little different, something good. She would stand on a little stool so she could stir the double boiler and on Saturday mornings she helped the family cook mix ingredients for Sunday's cake. She entertained the family with new inventions, prepared with care and hope. And though she insisted that she always told the truth, she also captivated them with stories that sounded preposterous, so loaded were they with lurid details. Her father told her she'd make a good reporter.

Propped on one of Mary Frances' bookshelves was an old piece of painted leather she'd found in a junk shop in Zurich in 1936, a portrait of a wrinkled old woman, Ursula von Ott, born in 1767. Intrigued and recognizing something familiar in Ursula's gaze, Mary Frances bought the picture. It would teach her about aging, she thought; she planned to learn as much as possible and then write a book about the art of growing old.

Over the years, Mary Frances carried the picture wherever she went, hanging it above desk or bed. Silverfish ate much of the pigment surrounding the old woman, but the face itself remained ugly, vivid and oddly unperturbed. Mary Frances didn't write the book she planned, but she never stopped watching Sister Age, as she called Ursula von Ott, who calmly looked past her. "I am glad that I have been able to live as long as I have, so that I can understand why Ursula von Ott did not weep as she stood by the funeral urn of her son, surrounded by all the vivid sights of his short silly life … the fat cupids, the fatter Venuses whose satiny knees he lolled against," wrote Mary Frances in the afterword to the collection of short stories, Sister Age, published two years before we met. "She did not smile, but behind her deep monkey-eyes she surely felt a reassuring warmth of amusement, along with her pity that he never had tried to feel it too."

The last time I saw Mary Frances was in the spring of 1989. Her voice had sunk to a whisper. She could no longer guide her elegant hands, now knotted in her lap, but had managed to keep working by breathing notes and stories into a tape-recorder each night for her secretary to transcribe the following day. Even this method, never totally satisfactory, was now exhausting. Not impossible, however, not for Mary Frances. Curled in her wheelchair, wraithlike and twisted, she greeted guests with unwavering courtesy and charm. Her lips were still bright red, her eyes still glittered, her courage (though she would hate such a pretentious word) was steady.

She had written me that she was working on a Secret Project. I don't know if that project became To Begin Again, but I like to think it did. And I like to think it was she who chose the book's title. Mary Frances was a person who began again, every day. And what she gave me, Ursula von Ott had shown her: that in spite of our wrinkling limbs and fading voices and despite the inevitable slowing down of physical things, we can go on—with forbearance and understanding and no small measure of wit.

"Parts of the Aging Process are scary, of course," she wrote in Sister Age,

but the more we know about them, the less they need be. That is why I wish we were more deliberately taught, in early years, to prepare for this condition. It would leave a lot of us freed to enjoy the obvious rewards of being old, when the sound of a child's laugh or the catch of sunlight on a flower petal is as poignant as ever was a girl's voice to an adolescent ear, or the tap of a golf-ball into its cup to a balding banker's.

Composed under the shadow of Sister Age, To Begin Again records Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher's abiding appetite for life.