SOURCE: "A Hunger Artist," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXVIII, No. 47, January 11, 1993, pp. 107-10.

In the following essay, Hawthorne reflects upon Fisher's life and career, emphasizing the importance of sensual experience and memory in her writing.

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher's just issued book, To Begin Again: Stories and Memoirs, 1908–1929, is mostly about the years of her youth in California, before her first marriage and her now celebrated sojourns in France and Switzerland. Some of these pieces were written as recently as a couple of years ago, when she was fully in the grip of the indignities of old age and Parkinson's, and could be found propped in bed on pillows, drinking strange pink cocktails through a straw and feeding on—what else?—oysters. She died last June, on the verge of her eighty-fourth birthday.

Since the publication, in 1937, of Serve It Forth, her first book, M. F. K...