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How to Cook a Coyote: The Joy of Old Age

by Betty Fussell

A memoir of change and mortality in old age

Regular price $21.41 USD
Regular price $35.69 USD Sale price $21.41 USD
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Hardcover New English

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AlbakiReads Editorial

A memoir of change and mortality in old age

Betty Fussell’s memoir looks back on a decade marked by major changes: moving from Manhattan to a Montecito retirement community, experiencing blindness, and facing the passage of time at ninety-eight. Family, friends, former adversaries, and lovers enter her recollections, while a coyote serves as a recurring emblem for the forces she cannot control. The book brings together food writing’s author and critic with questions of aging, memory, and mortality. Its title’s promise of a “recipe” points not to a cookbook, but to a memoir considering how to attend to life when its limits are increasingly present.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in memoirs about aging and later life
  • Readers curious about Betty Fussell’s reflections on food, family, and memory
  • Readers drawn to memoirs that consider mortality and the limits of control

Themes

Aging and mortalityChange and memoryFood and culinary writingThe uncontrollable

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

Soigné! A recipe for survival. A juicy, sexy, and wise memoir from the “gifted essayist and meditative thinker” that captures the urgency of life at the age of ninety-eight (The New York Times)

From telling what it’s like to go blind to confronting the ongoing erosion of time and the mystery of what’s to come, How to Cook a Coyote recounts a decade of change as the celebrated food writer and critic Betty Fussell moves from Manhattan to the Montecito retirement community where Julia Child once resided. As Fussell recalls family, friends, enemies, and lovers with wry humor, affection, and a sharp-eyed confrontation with mortality, all the while, the coyote watches. An emblem of the wild and her metaphor for all the things one can’t control—this coyote stalks her, taking on greater emotional and metaphorical resonance as the days progress.

Ultimately this exciting new work from an incomparable voice in American writing provides a recipe for how to enjoy each moment as if it were the last day of your life.
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