My book club met to discuss The Gastronomical Me by MFK Fisher recently. I last read Mrs. Fisher when I was quite young, and while I fell in love with her, and all the places she had lived and the food she had eaten, I don't think I ever really understood her. Or at least I didn't quite pick up on her subtleties and deeper explorations, and how adept she was at hiding in plain sight.

As a young woman, I admired Mrs. Fisher for her adventuresome lunches in the French countryside and her kitchens in Provence with their larders stocked with just baked bread and over-ripe tomatoes. Now, a little older and wiser, I am struck by how deftly she navigates the tangle of being human. How in writing about the seemingly minor details of daily life, she simply, almost casually, uncovers our unspoken desires, our hidden hungers, sometimes offering up the palatable and unpalatable side-by-side, the true story of what she saw and tasted often only revealed by reading between the lines.

MKF Fisher wrote about her life during the Great Depression and WWII, and yet she never directly comments on these exceptionally influential events. Instead, she narrows her lens on the intimate details of what she ate, and what that said about the people she was with, about their preoccupations and passions and how they coped with the enormous challenges of this time in history.

Cleverly and a little mischievously, she distracts us into thinking she is writing about food and the pleasures of eating. But pick up The Gastronomical Me, one of her most famous food memoirs, and you will also be reading about war, sex, infidelity, homosexuality, poverty, race, violence, feminism, class and privilege, divorce, addiction, love, passion, gender, death, suffering, grief. It's especially intriguing to discover that she wrote The Gastronomical Me over a period of several months, self-sequestered with a secret, out-of-wedlock pregnancy in 1943.

At times cool, snobbish and high-strung, she can alienate today's readers as much as she inspires them. But personally I'm delighted to rediscover my old muse, to uncover a depth and intricacy previously unrecognized. In rereading Mrs. Fisher, I have come to appreciate, especially in this age of confessional, too-much-information bestsellers, how much can be revealed in restraint and in the seemingly mundane act of feeding ourselves.

There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more insistent hungers. We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we'll be no less full of human dignity.

--MFK Fisher, The Gastronomical Me