HOW TO COOK A COYOTE

The noted food writer contemplates life as she nears the century mark.

Born in the Los Angeles area in 1927, Fussell has been living in a retirement home in Santa Barbara, California, for a decade, having finally gotten away from New York, where she’d made her name as a food writer and critic. From that vantage point, “the one place in California where mountains run east to west along the sea to leave a strip so narrow there’s no land left for the ticky-tacky developers who gulped down my earlier home and spat out the Inland Empire,” she remembers a life very well lived. Perhaps surprisingly, a good part of her narrative concerns lovers past and sex generally gone (though she does admit to a continuing interest in it); a tiny bit of venom is reserved for her ex-husband, the noted literary historian Paul Fussell, though more is directed toward Fussell’s next wife, who, she writes, “estranged Paul from his own children and disinherited them by shifting their promised inheritance to her own children.” The title’s promised recipe materializes bit by bit throughout Fussell’s elegant and often funny narrative; thankfully, it seems mostly a metaphor (though one with tasting notes, suggesting that the meat of a California coyote in the suburbs would have “a hint of small dog or cat”). More direct are Fussell’s observations on what happens as one ages, when life becomes a sequence of pill-taking rituals, “an exact sequence of steps, no improvisation allowed,” and the sad fact that our elders “become all but invisible” to the outside world. Another lamentable reality is the constant loss of friends, with her coffee klatsch now on its second set of members. Yet Fussell is stout-hearted and happy throughout, even as she notes “how weird it is to live without a future.”

A pleasure to read, although, as Fussell warns, we know how it’s going to end.