"Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher is a national treasure. For nearly 50 years she has been writing rare, fine prose about so many things that she is nearly impossible to define....In As They Were she has collected a number of essays -- she calls them 'reports' -- into an informal autobiography that wanders from Whittier, California, to the south of France." -- Newsweek

"She deserves the widest possible audience....The restaurants, hotels and markets she visits are aswarm with people and things, all of which she describes in fine detail, making the reader taste and hear and smell and see as few other writers can....Wherever she is, wherever she goes, she is grand company."

-- Chicago Sun-Times

"A breath of poetry wraps us as she relives for us a lifetime....She is the attentive spectator of her own life as well as its narrator." -- Philadelphia Inquirer

"To my mind, As They Were contains some of the best writing M.F.K. Fisher has ever done."

-- James Beard, Boston Globe

"Here are the voluptuous meals recalled by a woman who savored not only the food and wine but every detail of setting and nuance of conversation. Here, too, are meditations on travel by freighter....And here are the vivid evocations of places."