"I want to be good..."

[bronze_ribbons]

From "Calculated Seduction," Betty Fussell's 1998 review of MFK Fisher: A Life in Letters (New York Times Book Review):

We can see in the letters how the split in her desire to be fully a writer and fully a woman shaped her daily life and career. As a writer, she explained to [Lawrence Clark] Powell in 1947: ''I want to be good, but I also want children and love and stress and panic and in the end I am too tired to write with the nunlike ascetic self-denial and concentration it takes. If I live to be 50 . . . ah, that is my song . . . if I live to 50 I'll know how to write a good book.'' As decade followed decade, she changed the number but not the tune. At 55 she wrote, ''I have now raised the ante to the fairly imminent goal of SIXTY.''

Betty Fussell is herself the subject of a current NYT article, by Melissa Clark:

Betty Fussell, the 87-year-old food writer, never took the main road anywhere. If there was a beautiful, sensual, messy path, Betty took it, even if it meant getting lost along the way. Which is just what happened to me in that oak grove one morning last spring.

When I finally found my way out, I saw her, leaning on a walker. It had been years since we had last seen each other in New York, and I was struck by the change.

"Oh, did you fall?" I asked gently.

"You betcha I fell," she said. "I was coyote hunting in Montana with my son."