How to Cook a Coyote: The Joy of Old Age

Essayist and food writer Fussell (Eat, Live, Love, Die) serves up a spirited meditation on aging and mortality in this vibrant memoir. Interspersing the account with chapters that detail the process of baking coyote pie (“Mine won’t be the only life we feast on tonight”), Fussell reflects on what it means to grow old while refusing to fade quietly. Born in Riverside, Calif., in 1927, Fussell writes buoyantly of a life—from her years at Pomona College to her marriage and eventual divorce from writer Paul Fussell—shaped by academic achievement, literary ambition, and personal reinvention. As the book’s timeline progresses, she confronts without self-pity the indignities of aging, including glaucoma, physical frailty, and the deaths of her friends. “I mean to walk out of this life with a wink and a grin,” she writes, “no matter how it happens.” She calls on readers to live fully and fearlessly, reinvigorating those clichés with a unique blend of lyricism and irreverence (as when she admires while making broth how the chickens’ “beaked heads bobble on top of the boiling pot, seeming to sleep sweetly on a bed of claws”). It’s a graceful, gutsy ode to the pleasures and pains of growing old. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins/Loomis. (Dec.)