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.

Author: Betty Fussell
Publisher: Counterpoint LLC
Published: 12/02/2025
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.70w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9781640097384


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 10/15/2025
Library Journal 11/01/2025 pg. 79
Publishers Weekly 10/27/2025
Shelf Awareness 10/21/2025
BookPage 12/01/2025

About the Author
Born in Southern California in 1927, BETTY FUSSELL grew up in Riverside but lived for most of her life in the New York area. Best known for The Story of Corn, she is the author of twelve nonfiction books, ranging from biography to cookbooks, food history, and memoir. Her essays on food, travel, and the arts have appeared in scholarly journals, national magazines, and newspapers, including The New York Times, over the past fifty years. A specialist in Shakespeare, she has taught English and American literature and the history of food and its importance to American culture at colleges and universities across the country. She has lectured to audiences everywhere from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art to Iowa's State Fair.

Her many awards include the IACP's Jane Grigson Award, Food Arts's Silver Spoon Award, the James Beard Foundation's Journalism Award, and the Who's Who of Food & Beverage.

Her memoir, My Kitchen Wars, was performed in Hollywood and New York as a one-woman show by actress Dorothy Lyman. Her most recent book is Eat, Live, Love, Die: Selected Essays, published in 2016 by Counterpoint Press. She moved back to California to live at Casa Dorinda in Montecito in 2012.