M.F.K. Fisher

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, who wrote as M.F.K. Fisher, was a prominent American food writer and founder of the Napa Valley Wine Library. The author of 27 books, W. H. Auden once remarked, “I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.”^[1]

In 1937, she left her first husband for the writer and artist Dillwyn Parrish. Around this same time, her first book, Serve It Forth (1937), had opened to rave reviews in publications such as Harper’s Monthly, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Times.

Parrish’s ailing health prompted the couple to move to rural California in hopes that the climate and air would benefit him. His condition, however, only deteriorated. On an August morning in 1941, Mary was awakened by a gunshot. Parrish had committed suicide.^[2]

That year, Mary completed and published Consider the Oyster (1941), a wryly humorous book about all things oyster (from recipes to speculations about the oyster love lives), which she dedicated to Parrish.^[3] She remarried once more, to the publisher Donald Friede in 1944, though the union ended in divorce in 1950.

In his book about Julia Child, Alexander Prud’Homme casually mentions M.F.K. Fisher’s bisexuality.^[4] Historian Rachel Hope Cleves also writes that Fisher and a schoolmate, Eda Lord, had been lovers.[5]

Fisher herself writes extensively about the sexual politics of her girl’s school in the chapter “The First Oyster” from her book Gastronomical Me (1943). She describes the various crushes, love affairs, and even sex that the staff and student body were engaging in. She discusses her own crushes, as well, but rejects any sexuality labels.