Eat Live Love Die: Selected Essays

by Betty Fussell

Betty Fussell is an inspiring badass. She’s not just the award-winning author of numerous books ranging from biography and memoir to cookbooks and food history; not just a winner of the James Beard Foundation’s Journalism Award who was inducted into their “Who’s Who of American Food and Beverage” in 2009; and not just an extraordinary person whose fifty years’ worth of essays on food, travel, and the arts have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines and newspapers as varied as The New York Times , The New Yorker , The Los Angeles Times , Saveur , and Vogue .

This is a woman who at eighty-two years old (and despite being half-blind) went deer hunting for the very first time in the Montana foothills with her son, Sam (as described in her 2010 essay for the New York Times Magazine .) She got her deer.

This is a woman who declared in a 2005 essay for Vogue that she had to teach herself Latin and German from scratch (on top of teaching herself how to cook) as a young twenty-one year old bride, because "housewifery wasn't enough."

Indeed, for Fussell one subject is never enough. Counterpoint is thrilled to be publishing this selected anthology of her diverse essays.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Food, Memoir, Food Writing, Research, Travel

304 pages, Hardcover

Published November 15, 2016

About the author

Betty Harper Fussell is an award-winning American writer and is the author of eleven books, ranging from biography to cookbooks, food history and memoir. Over the last 50 years, her essays on food, travel and the arts have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines and newspapers as varied as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Saveur, Vogue, Food & Wine, Metropolitan Home and Gastronomica. Her memoir, My Kitchen Wars, was performed in Hollywood and New York as a one-woman show by actress Dorothy Lyman. Her most recent book is Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef, and she is now working on How to Cook a Coyote: A Manual of Survival in NYC.

Reviews

[Jenny (Reading Envy)]

I have been avoiding my Kindle because I know that this the book I left off on, and when I try to read it I almost instantly go into skim mode. I think that's a sign that these essays aren't for me. From the description, I expected maybe some lighter reading but thought I'd still enjoy it.

[Biblio Files (takingadayoff)]

Betty Fussell begins her collection of essays by reminding us that she is approaching ninety, so it's no surprise that her writing has a slightly old fashioned tone. By that I mean that when she writes about food, she does not write about celebrity chefs or trendy techniques likes sous vide or about head to tail dining. She writes about learning to cook as a young wife and about the history of jello and the evolution of oysters in American cuisine and the place of cafeterias in American social life. Actually, to be accurate, she does write about some celebrity chefs and others-- Craig Claiborne and Alice Waters and Julia Child, for instance. The essays were originally published in a variety of magazines and newspapers, so the tone can vary from informative and journalistic to personal and poignant. I very much enjoyed the collection, and having read much of her ex-husband Paul Fussell's works and her son Sam Fussell's book about his strange experience as a bodybuilder, I liked getting Betty's angle on things.

[Cat]

I loved how irascible and fascinating Betty Fussell is as a food writer. She reflects on her generation's insecurities--girls in women's colleges trying to date WWII veterans, heavy drinkers struggling to raise families and stick together (maritally speaking). She doesn't glamourize, but at the same time, through her reflections on her experiences and her generation, you realize how remarkable it is that she became a film scholar, a food historian, and a popular columnist, at the same time that she was an unhappy wife and struggling mother. The wit and insight of her voice is intoxicating; I love the connections that she makes between the messiness and viscerality of eating and speech and her meditations on the mythology of the mouth and the appetites. She is now in her 80s and is also merciless to herself and others about the way that appetite both denies mortality and defines it (food for worms). She writes about her own family--her mother's suicide, her science teacher father's reptile collection, her son's body-building, her daughter's expressionist painting--relentlessly and intently. You see that in part, this woman's stunning accomplishments and witty voice comes from a lifetime of pain and impressing people (the former intrinsically linked with the latter). I was also very moved by her transporting accounts of place: Sicily, Machu Picchu, Brazil. It's clear that by traveling the world, she has garnered insight and self-possession she would never have achieved at home. Speaking of that, her story about moving from her marital home and selling all her former possessions was wrenching--partly because of her acid reflections on attempting to keep hold of the past (an inevitably failed endeavor, and one that usually distorts the past), and partly because her wish for regeneration is so sincere (an avocado plant, rescued from a nearly discarded pit, always on her windowsill). A dear friend bought me this collection, and I'm so grateful he did. It was powerful to read her brilliance and ambivalence.

[Renee Gurley]

So well written...this is a master's work...

[Gayle Slagle]

For the most part Eat, Live, Love, Die: Selected Essays by Betty Fussell was a disappointment for me. While I found Fussell to be an intriguing, interesting, and intelligent rebel, the parts of the book (which comprised the majority of the essays) that deal with food and eating were somewhat boring and gave me more information about exotic foods than I ever wanted to know. I did enjoy the essays that pertained to Fussell's life and family and would have enjoyed the book more had she focused on those aspects. I am sure that a dedicated foodie would appreciate the book much more than I did, and I do recommend the book for those who enjoy reading about the preparation and consumption of food. However, if you do not fit into this category, you might find a large section of the book to be boring and not worth your time.

[Terri]

I picked this up at Powell's in Portland in February and it was my pre-bedtime read for quite a while, I limited myself to a few pages each night, the writing is delightful and I wanted to savor every last bit. Around mid September I reached the sections where she wrote more about her divorce and splitting of households, for a range of personal reasons those essays really resonated with me and helped me through some difficult spots.

[Andrea]

I am going to abandon this book. I feel like she is yelling at me, which would be fine if I still wanted to parse out what she is saying. But I don't.

[Marian]

2.5/5