How to Cook A Coyote: The Joy of Old Age
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At ninety-eight, Betty Fussell is still hungry: not for food alone, but for friends, for conversation, for sex, for meaning, for more time. In this memoir, written after her move from Manhattan to a Santa Barbara retirement community at age eighty-five, she looks aging squarely in the eye and refuses to sentimentalize what she sees.
In a series of short, sharp chapters, Fussell examines the disorienting experience of outliving many of her peers and ambitions. She reflects on the loss of eyesight and memory, on the difference between how women and men age, on estrangements that outlast the possibility of reconciliation, and on the pleasure of buying fruit at the farmers’ market like others take communion. She writes about postmarital love affairs, about the limits of hindsight, and about what it means to live in the blur of past and present tense—with no future but death.
How to Cook a Coyote is, in her words, “a coming-of-death story.” What makes it remarkable is not the inevitability of its conclusion but the fierce clarity with which she insists that life—even at the very end—remains urgent, unsolved, and deeply worth paying attention to.
Hardcover.
