Death in Earnest, and Probably too Long for a Blog but What the Hey

Okay, earnestly, I've been reading three stories about death.

The first is Joan Didion's memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. It chronicles in exquisite details her experience of life after the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and throughout the fatal sickness of their only daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne. Joan Didion finished the book in December 2004; her daughter died just at the end of August, 2005. The book was published two months later. I tried starting it but the accumulation of real-life details got in the way. I remember Joan Didion at a women writers event at Barnard in the late 1980s. I remember being amazed at Joan Didion's tiny size; it didn't seem to match "Goodbye to all That," and her frankness about migraines didn't square somehow with the essays I had read. What prompted me to actually start reading the memoir in earnest was a question posed by a friend. The question was: Is it a narcissistic book? My friend had heard mixed reports. I thought, Well, that's an interesting question. So onto the book, which I'm still halfway through.

The Year of Magical Thinking was interrupted by the arrival of a galley of Wendy Wasserstein's first, new, and now posthumous novel, The Elements of Style (due in April; this is the thing about galleys in NYC: they make recipients feel ahead of everybody else, sort of like the illusion some people in Los Angeles must maintain, being three hours "ahead"). The Elements of Style is about a group of mostly shallow, vapid, predatory, insecure, parentally-challenged, unimaginative Manhattan New Yorkers living in the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. The book made me laugh so much, I read it first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Its back cover proclaims all the marketing information related to the planned author tour. This information gave me pause; I considered the difficulty publishers have sometimes (this book's publisher is Alfred A. Knopf, a division of a vast publishing empire). Gail Collins wrote an appreciation of Wendy Wasserstein on the New York Times' editorial page, singling her out for niceness. Ms. Collins wrote, "Wendy understood that being considerate in a society of self-involved strivers was not for wimps. It required a steely inner toughness that was the hallmark of many of her heroines." I met that niceness one night at Café des Artistes, and it made for a funny coda to an evening that began with a talk she had just given at Makor.

Which brings me to a play not written by Wendy Wasserstein. I grabbed it off my shelf thinking I would get to it on a bus ride. Where I had to stop reading Joan Didion's book on the subway – it kept bringing me to tears – I found Margaret Edson's play Wit suitable for public transportation. Started it last evening, finished it this one. It's ostensibly a play about a Donne scholar named Vivian Bearing and her experience with treatment for breast cancer; I'd say it's more about some realities of serious literature scholarship and some truths about how science approaches what it yearns, as it were. I don't know if I could bring myself to see it performed– maybe now I've read it, maybe so – but it was a beautiful play, and the ending (appropriately) was poetic.

A friend of mine died recently, so I suppose this is part of why I would indulge so much death on paper. He was a peer. What can I say? Another corner of the city feels different now, and not in a good way. He didn't die playing badminton or something, and he doesn't get a toss-the-Rolodex card treatment. Of course, no one really does, even when they do, and I'm not talking about the Blackberry revolution.