"I do not know of any one in the United States who writes better prose." --W. H. Auden "Poet of the appetites." --John Updike "Because The Gastronomical Me is autobiographical, following Mrs. Fisher from childhood to widowhood in different countries, we are able to see its food not only as a matter of personal taste, but as a perpetual emotional and social force within a life. Here are meals as seductions, educations, diplomacies, communions. Unique among the classics of gastronomic writing, with its glamorous but not glamorized settings, its wartime drama and its powerful love story, The Gastronomical Me is a book about adult loss, survival, and love.

" --Patricia Storace, The New York Review of Books "She writes about fleeting tastes and feasts vividly, excitingly, sensuously, exquisitely. There is almost a wicked thrill in following her uninhibited track through the glories of the good life." --James Beard "She writes about food as others do about love, but rather better." --Clifton Fadiman t rather better." --Clifton Fadimant rather better." --Clifton Fadimant rather better." --Clifton Fadiman.