SOURCE: "Feasting on Life," in The Women's Review of Books, Vol. X, No. 6, March, 1993, pp. 14-15.

Wineapple is an American educator, critic, and biographer. In the following review of To Begin Again, she provides an account of her personal acquaintance with Fisher and an overview of the author's life.

M.F.K. Fisher changed my life. Not in direct, obvious ways: her ways, like her prose, are subtle, graceful and not a little mischievous.

I first spoke with her almost eight years ago when researching a biography of Janet Flanner, the New Yorker's longtime Paris correspondent. I had known that the two women were first acquainted in the summer of 1966, when Fisher was in Paris writing on the foods of the world for Time-Life. She was then 58, author of some eight books on the art of eating and translator of Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste. But though W...