Betty Fussell is ninety-eight, and the coyote is watching. It appears at the edges of her new life in the Montecito retirement community where Julia Child once lived, and it becomes a figure for everything that cannot be domesticated: time, desire, wildness, the body’s slow insistence on its own terms.
How to Cook a Coyote is a memoir of the decade in which Fussell moved from Manhattan to California, went blind, confronted mortality with wry humour, and continued to write with the sharpness that has made her one of American food writing’s most undersung voices. A New York Times Editors’ Choice.
Where MFK Fisher wrote about appetite and ageing with classical composure, Fussell writes about them with something wilder — more sex, more anger, more willingness to look at the coyote and not pretend it is a dog.
If you have ever suspected that the best food writing might come from someone who can no longer see the plate but can still taste everything on it — here is your proof. The coyote watches. Fussell writes. Neither blinks.
