Waiting now for the full obit that recognizes her achievements and her vast body of work, news from London today via a few paragrafs in the NY Times just now: Doris Lessing is dead at 94. If you haven't seen the video of her learning that she'd won the Nobel in Literature at 87, you must watch this. Clearly, her life was not about the glory.
Talking with reporters at her house after learning she'd won The Prize
(Shaun Curry/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images, thanks!)
It was 3 AM and I woke, cold, which, given the heat of the past weeks, seemed impossible. None of my tricks for getting back to sleep were working so I engaged in the one activity that we now know is the worst, reading on a screen where, as usual, I went straight to the obits. There Katie Hafner's extremely sad one about Lindy Hess, who ran the Columbia Publishing Course.
Photo by Lilian Kemp swiped from NYT obit and how Lindy looked when we met her (thanks)
We met Lindy in 1981 on the very day Reagan was being sworn in as president and the hostages were released in Iran. About nine months earlier, Jeff Stamps and I had sold Networking, our first joint book to Methuen, the British publisher, which was starting up an American list (for the publishing historians, Fred Jordan, for many years of Grove Press, was the publisher of this effort). The sale was thanks to Ron Bernstein, our agent at the time. But not long after we'd signed the contract, Ron called to say that Methuen's parent company in the UK had decided to cancel its plans to publish an American list. He was reassuring that he could sell the book again, which he did in very short order at a bit more than twice the original advance to...
Lindy Hess at Doubleday. It was a good break for people bringing out their first book with a major publisher. Lindy knew what she was doing. At 31, she was such a pro that the venerated old house had given her control of an imprint (Doubleday Dolphin). Because she appeared to be so knowledgeable and clearly was very talented and because we'd done the deal on the phone without meeting face-to-face, I thought she'd be much older than I. Instead, when we went to the swanky building on, was it Park Avenue, we were greeted by a woman three years younger with shoulder-length hair held back by a, was it velvet, headband that she removed and reinserted every few minutes. We talked in her office for a while about what was ahead in the process, mentioned that "Jackie Onassis" was now an editor at Doubleday, described her as "very nice" and "hard-working," and shortly thereafter asked if I needed to use the ladies room.
We went together and, as we stood in front of the mirror fidgeting with our hair after peeing -- isn't that part of the ritual: pee, wash your hands, fuss with your hair? -- she said I looked "elegant." I was wearing a long-sleeved ivory silk blouse with a self-tie that I'd borrowed from my friend-neighbor Emily, a dark-blue, knee-length wool skirt with two unusual pleats and one pocket that was stitched not quite right (I'd gotten it at a designer-discount shop) causing me to fuss with *it* constantly, and the most expensive pair of tall boots I'd ever bought, then about five years old. It felt like quite a compliment standing with "my editor" in Manhattan.
Things went well. Lindy liked the book and, when we made a most unusual proposal, she was game, a story I told here about four years ago. We were, how do you say, computer-savvy early on and thus had the ability to write, edit, and create the files for typesetting the book electronically. Doubleday had never done this but Lindy's response was enthusiastic. She inquired around to make sure it would work; she got a positive response; and she gave us a second contract for the typesetting, which, by today's standards, was a GIANT KLUDGE. We wrote the book on a Wang 2200, whose files were then converted by Typesetting Service in Providence, RI, that had a Digital PDP-11 and which could then output and paste-up pages in the format and design that Doubleday specified. It was the first time Doubleday had ever done a book this way and it worked. (The only thing that went wrong was that the FedEx truck delivering the final paste-ups had an accident on the West Side Drive in NY!)
Shortly after the book was published (my memory is that it was only weeks), Lindy left Doubleday and, if I've got this right, moved to Boston, and not long thereafter married her husband Bill Appleton. I was happy for her and sad that our acquisition editor had orphaned our book. A very nice guy took over -- Gerry Helferich -- who later went on to work at Wiley (a later publisher of Jeff's and my books) and who now writes his own books.
We saw Lindy a few times after she moved to Boston, us visting her house, she visting ours, but as time went on, we lost touch. Then about five years ago, David Miller of Garamond Agency, a new agent whom we worked with for a while, told us he was going to teach at the Columbia Publishing Course, which led to a discussion of the program and, alas, that's where Lindy had ended up, spending 25 years making that program and many of its graduates extremely successful.
Once you've been published, you can never be unpublished. There have been other people who have come along in the years since Lindy published Networking, people whose work has made a very big difference in Jeff's and my writing careers but Lindy was the first book publisher and I'd give anything at this moment to see her take that headband out and put it back in.
Mo-unique.
Nonpareil.
Beautiful.
Compassionate (this eulogy she gave for her chemo buddy is the paradigm of how it can be done with grace and humor).
Insightful (as in her book, How Can I Help? Everyday Ways to Help Your Loved One Live with Cancer, with practical advice for the people who ask the question and for those who have to answer it).
Practical (as in her book, written with Hope Ricciotti, The Real Life Body Book: A Young Woman's Complete Guide to Health and Wellness).
And above all courageous. Who else could write a hilarious book called The Courage Muscle: A Chicken's Guide to Living with Breast Cancer?
All of these books written, by the way, post-diagnosis.
Monique came to visit a few days after my husband was diagnosed with his terminal cancer, she in her 8th, or 18th, or 80th, it seemed, year of endurance. Metastatic breast cancer. She who was in treatment herself came to visit one who was about to enter the world of chemo and radiation and blood counts and tumor markers. In spite of all she was going through, she had the will to visit someone just beginning.
Before all this, Monique and I had become friends, principally on the phone, which is an excellent way to get to the heart of things. Which we did. Then, after Jeff began receiving treatment, we were often on that floor of the hospital that no one wanted to visit at the same time, which gave us time for more visits, more deepening.
Last week, I'd heard from Monique's childhood friend, Stuart Sadick, also a friend of mine, that the end was near... and I just saw that it had come on his Facebook page. Late last night.
A lot of people are crying today... and laughing. Thank you, dear person, for redefining a whole category of experience.
I wish Dr. Seuss were around to write a rhyme for this phenom. It would have to begin...
As different as different as different can be
Her name was Monique and she was so fun-ny...
At the very tail end of this day of atonement, a small montage of four, two in my news, two in yours, who died in the past few months of pancreatic cancer.
Clockwise from upper left, my dear friend, Donna Bannon from my hometown, who lived only 25 days post-diagnosis; my darling husband, Jeff Stamps, who lived 13 months post-diagnosis with great equanimity and dignity; Nobel laureate Ralph Steinman, who lived 4.5 years post-diagnosis and was experimenting on himself with a vaccine that held potential to ameliorate this horrid disease; and, of course, the most famous of all, Steve Jobs, who lived 7 years post-diagnosis with the most rare form of the disease, which is sometimes curable.
Donations in their memories to Pancreatic Cancer Action Network.
Bryan Marquard's sensitive and insightful obit ("Daja Meston: Buddhist peace hid his inner struggles") in today's Boston Globe for our dear friend, Wangchuk. I've written about him and his wife Phuni a number of times before here, never expecting what has happened. Wangchuk, who struggled with depression, took his own life on July 11.
Phuni, along with their friends Robert Barnett, head of the Contemporary Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia University, and Patrick Curley, an attorney here in Boston, speak beautifully about Wangchuk in the obit. Please read it.
Today friends and family will gather for his memorial service at 3 PM at 10 Twin Pond Lane, Lincoln, MA.
We are all so very sad.
...has died. The Argentine journalist, who for a number of years headed the Latin American studies department at Rutgers, was also a novelist whose books played with reality, Santa Evita perhaps the emblem of the genre. What genre, I'm not certain, but Tomas did it masterfully. The story of an investigative reporter on the hunt to find Eva Peron's body, the book is carefully footnoted to the point that it's nearly impossible to distinguish what came out of the author's mind and what the reader can actually google.
I have two photos of Tomas, neither very good, taken at book club at our house in 2006. The backstory: as previously reported, I often take the train back and forth to New York. As some measure of my particular karma, I often meet a writer on that journey. As karmas go, this is a good one.
But sometimes I'm very tired on these trips and don't want to talk to anyone at all. Such was the case early one Sunday evening in 2006 when I was a little late getting on the train. There were only a few seats available and I chose the one where I anticipated the least interaction--a couple sitting opposite each other, both with their laptops running. I sat down next to the woman (Gabriela Esquivada, far right in photo), we exchanged smiles, and I settled in for a rest.
A few minutes later, Gabriela asked if she could get by, then offered to get me a coffee for disturbing me...and we were off and running. She introduced me to her husband, who was deep in concentration, watching some sort of thriller, as I recall...and then she explained who he was, one of the great Latin American writers, and soon all of us were talking. (It was from Tomas that I later learned that Carlos Fuentes loves bluefish, a phrase that will eventually make it into an essay about such train encounters, drafted so far only in my head.)
But why were they coming to Boston? Tomas turned the right side of his head toward me, a very large and red scar searing down the side, just behind his ear. Glioblastoma, he said, and he was being treated here in Boston.
We struck up a friendship and a month or so later, Tomas and Gabriela, also an Argentine journalist and editor, came to book club. I wrote a note about the evening for my friends on Zoetrope (see below). About two years ago, we lost touch. I was sad to see the news this morning but amazed that he lived for so long with this terrible disease.
From my notes:
Tomas Eloy Martinez came to our book club last night
to discuss Santa Evita. So far, Tomas has written seven
novels, I believe, and a whole lot of journalism down the years, but has not
had as much exposure in the US as abroad, at 71 not as familiar as other Lat
American writers, Carlos Fuentes, for example, whom he’s known since he was 18
(Fuentes is 10 years older). One
of Tomas’s books, unpublished in the US, The Flight of the Queen has sold 500k sales globally, many translations, best foreign book
in China (dunno year), and on. I found this interview
with him in Three Monkeys Online and it squares with what I’ve been learning
from him, worth reading.
Tomas and Gabriela Esquivada-Martinez, his wife, have been here in Boston for past couple of months where Tomas is being treated for brain tumor. I met them in early March on the train from NY to Boston ten days after his surgery; they were traveling to Boston from their home in Highland Park, NJ, where he’s been heading Lat Amer studies dept at Rutgers. Mission: his first round of chemo and radiation. When I picked them up last night, I expected him to look haggard and ill. He looks great. His incision is healing and he spoke well and clearly for many hours.
Tomas focused on the line between fiction and fact, blurry, saying that the woman writing the intro to the anthology of his work being pub’d in Venezuela (hope I’ve got this right) finds the theme of his work to be “doubt.” I agree, caveat being that I’ve only read one of his books…but it is impossible to know, reading it, whether it is fact or fiction. How could this be a novel, I kept asking myself, but Tomas told us last night that only the last three pages are true. He entered the “black hole” of nine missing months in Eva Peron’s history and from it spun this book. Very dark, no redeeming characters, except perhaps the “I” who appears late in the book, relatively speaking, and is never fully revealed.
My book club has been meeting for 15 or so years, monthly, 190 books to date, primarily classics. This evening was in its own category and I encourage everyone to read Tomas’s work.
