STAY ME, OH COMFORT ME

Even fans of the late, bright gastronomic memoirist (d. 1992) might be tiring of all the tributes to her that have been gushing forth, as well as of the incidental jottings and recycled reminiscences by her that publishers have been serving forth during the past few years. But whatever their reaction to last year's collection of Fisher's snippets on her childhood and adolescence, To Begin Again, readers will likely be moved by this less artful, more coherent account couched in diary entries, letters, and some retrospective notes. Fisher touches here on life with her first husband, Al, in their native California, after their idyllic and much chronicled two-year honeymoon in France; then on an odd stretch back in Europe with both Al and "Tim," the man who would be her second husband. Most affecting, though, are entries from her four years with Tim, most of them dominated by his long, painful illness that ended in suicide. Fisher's writing to date, for all its sensual-autobiographical content, has been naggingly evasive about her personal life. But here she writes with directness and genuine emotion, not to impress an audience but to console herself. Less remarkable in isolation than Fisher's early works, perhaps, but affecting to those who have come to know through those writings the author's more cheerful, made-up face. This glimpse behind the lipstick is a fitting wrap-up, then—one that brings depth and dimension to the body of Fisher's work.