How to Cook a Coyote: The Joy of Old Age

Soigné! A recipe for survival. A juicy, sexy, and wise memoir from the “gifted essayist and meditative thinker” that captures the urgency of life at the age of ninety-eight (The New York Times)

From telling what it’s like to go blind to confronting the ongoing erosion of time and the mystery of what’s to come, How to Cook a Coyote recounts a decade of change as the celebrated food writer and critic Betty Fussell moves from Manhattan to the Montecito retirement community where Julia Child once resided. As Fussell recalls family, friends, enemies, and lovers with wry humor, affection, and a sharp-eyed confrontation with mortality, all the while, the coyote watches. An emblem of the wild and her metaphor for all the things one can’t control—this coyote stalks her, taking on greater emotional and metaphorical resonance as the days progress.

Ultimately this exciting new work from an incomparable voice in American writing provides a recipe for how to enjoy each moment as if it were the last day of your life.