Joan Reardon

April 30, 2024: Having just learned that Joan Reardon completed her life journey in December 2023, it seems only right to honor her memory here,  given her extensive study and work writing three books and many articles about M.F.K. Fisher.

Joan and I became good friends over the years she spent researching my mother’s long and complex life. We shared stories as she accessed every piece of information available to  her to gain information that might inform the life story she and my mother agreed she could write.  She visited the extensive collection curated at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America on the Harvard University campus.  She spoke with numerous colleagues, friends, and family members who shared stories and information- all fascinating, some printable.  She gave over 12 years of her life to telling the best version of M.F.K. Fisher’s life possible.  Her biography, Poet of the Appetites: The Lives and Loves of M.F.K. Fisher, was published by North Point Press in 2004.  She then created a delightful little book, M.F.K. Fisher among the Pots and Pans: Celebrating Her Kitchens.  This book was published by the University of California Press in 2008, and was dedicated to “Mary Frances  in honor of the hundredth anniversary of her birth, July 3, 1908.” Joan had previously published M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child & Alice Waters: Celebrating the Pleasures of the Table in 1994.  She also wrote numerous Introductions and Prefaces to important books including M.F.K. Fisher: An Annotated Bibliography by Donald Zealand and Randall Tarpey-Schwed and  even to M.F.K. Fisher’s The Art of Eating: 50th Anniversary Edition, in continuous print since 1954.

In addition to her extensive writing about M.F.K. Fisher, she had a long and wonderful marriage to Historian John Reardon, she was a professor and chair of the English department at what was then Barat College in Lake Forest, IL, and she spent many years as Dame of Distinction of the Chicago Chapter of Les Dames D’Escoffier. She was an accomplished and celebrated author and a culinary historian.  Her friendship was cherished by many.

Joan knew more about my family than I ever will.  She cheerfully answered questions I had, and engaged with me regularly as she learned new and interesting pieces of the story.  We spent hours looking through dusty boxes of papers, photographs, and mementos that my mother had collected, and I came to consider her a good and cherished friend.

Thank you, Joan, for doing some hard work, for digging deeply to make someone else’s life come alive, for sharing your own fascinating journey and life with so many, and for leaving behind words  and memories that will be enjoyed long into the future.  You are missed by many, and I hope that you are aware of the large part you have played in many lives.

Kennedy Golden, M.F.K. Fisher’s daughter