M. F. K. FISHER (July 3, 1908...

M. F. K. FISHER (July 3, 1908 -- June 23, 1992) Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher was that rarest of teachers, the kind who instructs gently, by example. Her essays and stories have, for decades, shown readers how to refine and trust their senses, so that they can extract more life from living. The main thing, she tells us, is to widen one’s experience so that the smallest of details can be evocative, resonant and important. She showed in all of her writing that small things can have enormous history and meaning; and when they do, daily life becomes something that we bring all our senses to bear upon.

Indeed, Fisher always called herself a reporter, never a writer. Her work had an unflinching, aloof tone--even my favorite story, “Wind Chill Factor,” in which she wakes in the middle of the night, deeply frightened by her first panic attack. I could not, for the longest time, resolve this aloofness. How could someone who seemed to live so close to the bone be so infuriatingly un-autobiographical? In her description of Ursula von Ott, the figure of an old woman in the painting that inspired “Sister Age,” Fisher wrote: “She’s removed from it, from all the nonsense and frustration. She’s aloof and real. She’s past vanity.” Aloof and real; it has taken me a while to understand this combination . Fisher was completely comfortable treating her perceptions as fact. There was no need to embroider them with autobiography. She trusted her senses, she trusted herself, and she trusted the prism she noticed things through. “She does not need anything,” Fisher wrote of Ursula von Ott, “that is not already within her.”

I went to visit M.F.K. Fisher several months ago, at her home in Glen Ellen. I wanted to ask her if she thought it was still possible to live as she’d lived. “I do,” she told me, waving a long arm around the room to encompass the sickbed, the amplifier that made it possible to hear her, and the hospital tray, “in spite of all this.” She did not doubt, she told me, that she would come back in a different form after she died, “as the wind, or perhaps an oyster.”