Voting Station

M.F.K. Fisher

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Author

The Resume

    (July 3, 1908-June 22, 1992)
    Born in Albion, Michigan
    Birth name was Mary Frances Kennedy
    Food writer and memoirist
    Wrote 'Serve It Forth' (1937), 'Consider the Oyster' (1941), 'How to Cook a Wolf' (1942), 'The Gastronomical Me' (1943), 'An Alphabet for Gourmets' (1949), 'The Art of Eating' (1954), 'Map of Another Town: A Memoir of Provence' (1964), 'French Provincial Cooking' (1968), 'Among Friends' (1971), 'Not a Station But a Place' (1979), 'As They Were' (1982) and 'Long Ago In France: The Years In Dijon' (1991)
    Translated Brillat-Savarin's 'The Physiology of Taste'

Why she might be annoying:

    Her father, expecting her to be born on July 4, planned to call her Independencia; she claimed that her mother had the doctor induce labor early to prevent that.
    She said about growing up, 'I was a haughty girl.'
    She had a daughter out of wedlock and never identified the father.
    She had a nervous breakdown.
    During Christmas of 1965, she came alarmingly close to giving her family food poisoning when she told her husband to stuff the turkey (with a raw-oyster stuffing) at night and she would roast it the next morning: 'I knew better, I was not thinking.'

Why she might not be annoying:

    While in France, she was photographed by Man Ray, who considered her an enchantress.
    A French woman asked her, 'How can one dare to call herself a writer on gastronomy in the United States, where, from everything we hear, gastronomy does not yet exist?' (This may be less 'Why M.F.K. Fisher might not be annoying' than 'Evidence the French really are as snooty as you've heard.')
    In the years leading up to her breakdown, he second husband and her brother both committed suicide, and her mother died leaving her as her father's caretaker.
    She said, 'Look, if you have to eat to live, you may as well enjoy it.'
    W.H. Auden declared, 'I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.'

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2022, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 8 Votes: 87.50% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 2 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2017, Out of 8 Votes: 37.50% Annoying
    In 2016, Out of 5 Votes: 40.0% Annoying
    In 2015, Out of 6 Votes: 83.33% Annoying
    In 2014, Out of 11 Votes: 54.55% Annoying
    In 2013, Out of 16 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2012, Out of 10 Votes: 60.0% Annoying
    In 2011, Out of 12 Votes: 83.33% Annoying