Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan: The Fall

Good evening. Again welcome. My name is Rachel Cass and on behalf of Harvard bookstore I am delighted to welcome you to this evening's event with writer and Pulitzer Prize winning critic Gail Caldwell. Again I'll remind people who are standing in the back. We do have all of the chairs out but the event is on the monitors in the first and second room in the store and you'll be able to hear the audio in the store. So if you want to watch the watch the event elsewhere and come back for the signing. If you can't stand the heat in here. Sorry about that. This evening's reading is the last event in our summer events calendar with the one exception of this weekend's tax holiday sale. Well everyone who shops in the store this weekend does so tax free thanks to the state of Massachusetts. The Harvard bookstore frequent buyers will receive an additional 10 percent off all purchases made in the store Saturday and Sunday. So come and visit us. And in September our author event series will resume in full force with numerous free in-store events as well as ticketed events including a panel discussion with Charles and Gregory fried about torture. An event with Arianna

Huffington one with Tony Blair in conversation with Tina Brown. An event with wine guru Mark Oldman at upstairs on the square. For more information about our fall events please visit us online at Harvard dot com where you can also sign up for our weekly e-mail newsletter. And if you prefer the tactile are paper events Flyers should be out early next week so you can pick one of those up in the store. And now it's my my great pleasure to introduce Gail Caldwell. Few people have led a more wide ranging literary life than MS Caldwell. She spent over 20 years at the Boston Globe first as a staff writer and later as chief book critic. She has taught writing courses at Boston University has been the arts director the arts editor excuse me for Boston Review and was awarded the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for criticism for her work at the Globe. She's also penned a previous memoir about growing up in the Texas panhandle during the 50s and 60s. This love and connection to literature was one of the many building blocks of the friendship she

mourns. And let's take the Long Way Home. Ms. Caldwells friendship with fellow writer Caroline Knapp blossomed over their love of the outdoors their dogs water sports and books. Among other things let's take the long way home describes the miracle of two such kindred spirits finding one another and the deep grief of one of the friends being taken to early and very quickly. Laura Miller of Salon.com described as Caldwell's writing as serene wry and meditative and the memoir was described as a gift of a book by the Christian Science Monitor. After the talk this evening we will have time for questions followed by a signing here at the front. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank anyone who purchases a copy of the book here this evening. By doing so you are supporting both a local independent bookstore and this author series. And now please join me in welcoming Gail Caldwell. Thank you so much.

Can everybody hear me. How was that. I don't want to have to think about this once I start going so I may need I may need my help. God thank you for coming. I when I my editor told me that this was going to be a summer publication and I said but no one will come to readings in the summer because Cambridge is empty so I see I was wrong about that and I looked out when I was being introduced and I started to say how many people here knew carillon but I actually don't need to ask that because I know a lot of people here did and do know her work and that means a lot to me. I've thought I'm very nervous. I don't I can't believe I'm so nervous and I feel like this is my home bookstore. I've been coming to this bookstore for 30 years and I've read here before and I read last night and in Portsmouth New Hampshire and knew no one and that was easy because I didn't know anyone so and they had this huge Mike and I got out there and said I feel like I should be playing the steel guitar.

So it was a nice summer night. I have I've been tormented about what to read because this book is incredibly for me devastating and sad and I also realize today as I was thinking about that because I can't just jump into the sadness without a lot of people already know about that. Of course it's sad because there was so much love and so much happiness shared which is the essence of what real devastating loss is about. So I think what I'm going to do is read the first chapter because the pub day was only a couple of days ago I'm assuming that most people have not read the book. And rather than kind of go into places that lie ahead of the story I think I will just read what is my memory of some of the most joyous parts of my friendship with Caroline and sorry then I'm going to

read another smaller part so. I can still see her standing on the shore a towel around her neck and a post-workout cigarette in her hand half Gidget and half splendid splinter her rower's arms in defiant contrast to the awful pink bathing suit she'd found somewhere. It was the summer of 1997 and Caroline and I had decided to swap sports. I would give her swimming lessons and she would teach me how to row. This arrangement explained why I was crouched in my closest friends needled then racing shell looking less like a rower than a drunken spider. We were on New Hampshire's chikor were like a pristine mile long body of water near the White

Mountains and the only other person there to watch my exploits was our friend Tom who was with us on vacation. Excellent. Caroline called out to me every time I made the slightest maneuver however feeble I was clinging to the oars with the white knuckled grip at 37 Caroline had been rowing for more than a decade. I was nearly nine years old or a lifelong swimmer and figured I still had the physical wherewithal to grasp the basics of a skull upon the water. But as much as I longed to imitate Caroline whose stroke had the precision of a metronome I hadn't realized that sitting in the boat would feel as unstable as balancing on a floating leaf. How had I let her talk me into this novice scullers usually learn and about twice the width and weight of Karolides vendors. Later she confessed that she couldn't wait that day to see me flip. But toys there on water's edge hollering instructions she was all good

cheer and steely enthusiasm. She might as well have been tomming like success. Fleeting as it was with the stopwatch with the oar is my only leverage. I started listing toward the water and then froze at a precarious 60 degree angle held there more paralysis than by any sense of balance. Tom was belly laughing from the dock. The farther I tipped the harder he laughed. I've been going down. I cried. No you're not. Said Caroline. Her face is deadpan as a coach is in a losing season. No you're not. Keep your hands together stay still. Don't look at the water look at your hands. Now look at me. The voice consoled and instructed long enough for me to straighten into position and I managed five or six strokes across flatwater before I went flying out of the boat and into the lake. By the time I came up a few seconds later and ten yards out. Caroline was laughing and I had been given a

glimpse of the Rapture. The three of us had gone to Chicago for the month of August after Tom had placed an ad for a summer rental. Three riders with dogs seek house near water and trails. The result of his search was a ramshackle 19th century farmhouse that we would return to for years surrounded by Rolling Meadows. The place had everything we could have wanted cavernous rooms with old quilts and spinning wheels. A camp kitchen and massive stone fireplace. Tall windows that looked out on the White Mountains. The lake was a few hundred yards away. Mornings and some evenings carillon and I would leave behind the dogs watching from the front windows and walk down to the water where she rode the length of the lake and I swam its perimeter. I was the otter and she was the dragon fly and I'd stop every so often to watch her flight back and forth for six certain Miles. Sometimes she pulled over into the

marshes so that she could scrutinize my flip turns in the water. We had been friends for a couple of years by then and we had the competitive spirit that belongs to sisters our adolescent girls each of us wanted whatever prowess the other possessed the gold and hues of the place and the easy days it offered. River walks and wildflowers and rhubarb pie or far loftier than what Caroline had anticipated. She considered most vacations forced marches out of town. I was only slightly more adventurous wishing I could parachute into summer trips without having to fret about the dog or shop for 40 pounds of produce. Both riders who lived alone Caroline and I shared a general intractability at disrupting our routines the daily walks at Cambridge the exercise regimens we shared or compared the meals and phone calls and hours of solitary work that we referred to as our little lives.

Paris is overrated. Carol I'd like to claim partly to make me laugh when she met a friend of mine one evening who was familiar with her books. He asked if she spent a lot of time in New York. Are you kidding she said. I hardly even get to Somerville. Wedded to the sanctity of the familiar we made ourselves leave town just to check the vacation off the list then return to the joys and terrors of ordinary life. I have a photograph from one of those summers at Chikara framing the backs of my dog and Caroline's Clementine and Lucille who are silhouetted in the window seat and looking outside. It is the classic dog photo capturing vigilance and loyalty to tale's resting side by side two animals glued to their post. What I didn't realize for years is that in the middle distance of the picture through the window and out to the fields beyond you can make out the smallest of figures an

outline of Caroline and me walking down the hill. We must have been on our way to the lake and the dogs by now familiar with our routine had assumed their positions. Caroline's boyfriend Marelli a photographer had seen the beauty of the shot and grabbed his camera. I discovered this image the year after she died and it has always seemed like a clue in a painting a secret garden revealed only after it is gone. Chikara itself has taken on an idyllic glow. I remember the night Caroline nearly beat Tom at arm wrestling the mouse that set me on to the dining room table while she howled with laughter. The best camper awards we instituted and that she always won I have glossed over the mosquitos the day Caroline got angry when I left her in a slower moving kayak and rode off into the fog alone. Like most memories tensed with the final chapter. Mine carry a physical weight of sadness.

What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part. The two of us road together and in tandem for five years after that first summer we both live near the Charles River a labyrinthine body of water that winds its way through greater Boston for nine miles from upper and through Cambridge and into Boston Harbor with enough curves and consistently flatwater to be a mecca for rowers because Caroline was small in stature and could body press more than her own weight. I got to calling her Tita or little brute the boathouses we rode out of were a couple of miles apart and I could recognize her stroke from a hundred yards away. I'd be there waiting for her near the Eliot bridge or the week's footbridge by Harvard ready to ply her with questions about form and speed and where to position one's thumbs when she went out hours ahead of me. She fired off unpunctuated emails as soon as she got home.

Hurry up. The water is flat. We logged hundreds of miles together and solo from April to November. She endured my calls in those first couple of summers to discuss the mechanics of rowing. I want to talk about thrust. I would say within say an intensity or did you know the human head weighs 13 pounds. Mm hmm. The answer and soon I would hear a soft click click in the background evidence that she had begun a game of computer solitaire her equivalent of a telephonic yawn at the end of the day when we walked the dogs. We compared finger and hand calluses the battle scars of good rowing the way teenage girls used to compare tans or charm bracelets because she was and always would be the better rower. I accepted her continual smugness and vowed to get even in the pool one year for Christmas. I gave her a photograph from the 1940s of two women rowers in a

double at Oxford England. She hung it on a wall near her bed above a framed banner that read the zeal is a useful fire. Both pictures hang in my bedroom now. Next to the photograph of the dogs Caroline died in early June of 2002 when she was 42. Seven weeks after she was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer in the first few weeks in the hospital when she was trying to write a will she told me she wanted me to have her boat the old Van Dusen in which I'd learned to row and that she had cared for over the years as there were a beloved horse. I was sitting on her hospital bed when she said it during one of those early death talks. When you know what is coming and are trying to muscle your way through. So I told her I'd take the boat only if I could follow rowing tradition and have her name painted on the bow. It would be the Caroline Knapp. No way she said the same light in her

eyes is the day she had taught me to row. You have to call it brute Tita. I just want to read a little more. I think I have time before one enters the spectrum of sorrow which changes even the color of trees. There is a blind and daringly wrong assumption that probably allows us to blunder through the days. There is a way one thinks that the show will never end or that loss when it comes will be toward the end of the road not in its middle. I was 51 when Caroline died and by that point in life you should have gone to another funerals to be able to quote the verses from Ecclesiastes diese by heart but the day we found out that Caroline was ill the day the doctors use those dreaded words we can make her more comfortable. I remember walking down the street a bright April street glimmering with life

and saying aloud to myself with a sort of shocked innocence you really thought you were going to get away with it didn't you. By which I meant that I might somehow sidestep the cruelty of an intolerable loss when rendered without the willful or natural exit signs of drug overdose suicide or old age. But no one I loved no one I counted among the necessary pillars of life had died suddenly too young full of determination not to go. No one had gotten the bad lab report. Lost the hair. Been told to get her affairs in order. More important not Caroline. Not the best friend the kid sister the one who had joked for years that she would bring me soup decades down the line when I was too aged and frail to cook from the beginning there was something intangible and even spooky between us that could make strangers mistake us as sisters or lovers and that sometimes had friends refer to us by each

other's names. A year after her death a mutual friend called out to me at Fresh Pond the reservoir where we had walked. Caroline then burst into tears at her mistake. The friendship must have announced its depth by its obvious affection but also by our similarities muted or apparent that our life stories had when they were toward each other on corresponding paths was part of the early connection finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend than having her show up at your door. Funnier and better than you had conceived apart. We had each been frightened drunks and aspiring writers and dog lovers. Together we became a small corporation. We had a lot of dreams. Some of them silly. All part of the private code shared by people who plan to be around for the luxury of time. One was the testing center we thought we'd open in western Massachusetts populated by

Border Collies and Corgies because we'd be too old to have dogs that were big or unruly. The Border Collies would train the corgis we declared and the corgis would be what we fondly called the purse dogs. The tatting notion came about during one of our endless conversations about whether we were living our lives correctly. An ongoing dialogue that range from the serious writing solitude loneliness to the mundane wasted time the idiocies of urban life trash TV. Oh don't worry I'd said to Caroline One day when she asked if I thought she spent too much time with Law and Order reruns. Just think if we were living 200 years ago we'd be playing whist or tatting instead of watching television and we'd be worrying about that. There was a long pause. What is tatting. She had asked shyly as though the old craft were something of great importance and so that too became part of the private lexicon.

Tatting became the code word for the time wasters we and probably everyone else engage in. These were the sort of rag and bone markers that came flying back to me in a high wind of anguish when she was dying. I remember trying to explain the tatting center to someone who knew us then realizing how absurd it sounded and breaking down. Of course no one would understand it. Like most codes of intimacy it resisted translation. Part of what made it funny was that it was ours alone. One of the things we loved about rowing was its near mystical beauty. The Strokes cresting across the water the shimmering quiet of the Roe itself. Days after her death I dreamed that the two of us were standing together in a dark boathouse. It's only lightsource a line of incandescent blue skulls that hung above us like a wash of constellations in the dream I knew she was dead and I reached out for her and said But you're coming back right.

She smiled but shook her head. Her face was a well of sadness I think that's a good place to start. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all so much. I have one other page that I actually love and I I think I want to read it only because I think we have time and and it feels like a good note to end the reading part of this on and then I would love to hear from you because I think they're all there's a lot of heart and soul in this room and I would like to share the evening with you. Somebody asked me last night if I had a hard time

finishing this book from the audience. And I said oh my God I've had such a hard time that I wouldn't finish it. I got like nine tenths of the way through and then just walked away knowing that it was always there waiting for me and I knew how it ended. But I couldn't actually write the ending because I knew when I did that it was over and I couldn't bear that because it meant that a certain real state in which Caroline and I existed outside of time I was going to have to relinquish. And I I knew that I would have to. And they reminded me of this passage because I wrote a little bit about it at the time because it was confusing to be in this narrative zone that I think every writer goes into that is beyond our next door to reality. But in my case I would I would look at this photograph of her and say am I doing OK. And I I was I felt that this parallel

universe that was both hauntingly sad and also that I didn't want to leave. So this passage sort of takes care of that. Excuse me and it's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story it transforms it and it's rewrites the blur and epiphany of one way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death. But distance does us part time and space and the heart's weariness are the blander executioners of human connection. I have several recurring dreams about Caroline. In one she is living calmly in the woods in the little house of blues and greens in another I am typing a letter to her and the ink keeps disappearing on the page as I write. She is always dead or dying in these dreams but they are not awful or anguished. The reach between us always trumps the loss. And yet my one

unbearable dream is the one in which she is sick and in treatment and I cannot find her. We have lost touch. Our phone has been disconnected or my key breaks off in a locked door with her on the other side. There are many variations on this dream the one from which I wake up clawing at space but the message is unchanged. Life not death has intervened. The holiness of the heart's affections. Keats wrote. Trusting in nothing but that and the imagination. And I think now that Caroline and I still something in each other letting us go out and engage in the larger world. And as certain as I am about fact and memory and the influence of each upon the other finding the threads of all these stories has sent me into an eerie detached insistence that she not yet be gone. I have all the detritus of life and death that argues the contrary. The potato óg rotten recipe in her small

careful handwriting that falls out of a cookbook. A first edition of J-R Ackerley is my dog to love that she tracked down for me one Christmas and the mysterious CD I found in her house after she was gone. Untitled music for Caroline. It's every song from Norah Jones and Fiona Apple to Edith Piaf a testament to the unknowable passions we all carry with and once she referred to the core ambiguities of life as the darkside of joy. And here these days has been the reverse. A happy limbo in which I have brought her along on the journey. The writer's self-imposed fugue state. She has been thoroughly alive in the meadows and woods with the dogs through each trowing less than an argument and care free phone call. Her death these days is somewhere down the hall behind a closed but unlocked door. But for now she is Rivertown and laughing and pretty soon the phone will ring and one of us will say

What are you doing. And it will all began again. Thank you thank you for being such a wonderful audience including say the dog in the front row. I would love to hear from you anybody who has questions or comments and then we'll i guess we'll talk for a while and then Heather or someone will flag us when it's time to stop and we'll do signings. Here's one Jaime. Not for years. I wrote the first sentence which is a page I didn't read. I read the first and wrote the first and which is it's an old old story I had a friend and we shared everything and then she died. And so we shared

that too. And that's all I wrote for a year. I left it lying on a blank legal pad and didn't know actually even then what I was going to do with it. So I think it was when I actually really began the book who's five years after her death. And I think if I had tried to write it before then it would have been a very different book a long time. Hi Megan. While writing it. Nothing while writing it. In fact I think I spent six months. You know I was going to say I spent six months trying to get her permission of. And the root of translation e-mailing Spain for six months. What is true and I write about this in the book that I do

remember in the first year after Caroline's death that I thought that there would be an answer somewhere that somewhere somebody would tell me what grief was because it was so such a radically different experience from what I had expected. And so I remember reading Freud's mourning and melancholy and thinking surely this answer will be here and of course it was not at all. And I what I took great heart from actually was poetry which will you will understand and some of it I've written about some of these in here one in particular was a point that I read at her memorial service and that was really all that helped me to this day I find it surprising that I mean maybe I am ill read in this in the literature of grief. I was surprised by what I didn't know and how hungry I was looking hungrily I was looking for it

and didn't didn't find it maybe anywhere but there. Yes. Is that right. That's wonderful dogs connect us. I see somebody yes somebody else asked me that last night. Lucille died a year ago. She lived to the wonderful age of 14 and she was with Marelli for the next seven years. I think she did OK. Julianne are nodding at each other. She had she was very

loved and she was very loved by Morelli and had had always been since she was a puppy and a lot of people made sure she had as good a life as she could. So I think she did really well. Yes. That's a publishing matter. They they they chose only to use a photograph of me. No pictures in the book. So there are actually a lot of photographs that I had great joy finding that are various places including I can't remember the photograph of the dogs that I wrote about was taken by Marelli and they used it actually in a magazine where the excerpt of this ran. But there are some beautiful pictures that I found snapshots of the two of us that are on a Facebook page that random house started. So they're out there but they're not here.

Yeah. Yeah. Yes. To tell you the truth I don't know yet. I think so. I also and I've thought about this a lot. I think that for years I said that I would never write about this because it was too devastating. It was not something that even went into the zone of narrative for me. And then once I decided that I would I it felt like an unstoppable sort of fully formed story. And somebody asked me last week if it was hard if it was wrenching to write it and I bet a lot of writers in the room would agree that when you're writing it. The writing itself is so ubiquitous that the

emotion is secondary to it that the narrative is like a freight train. And I said no it wasn't wrenching writing it it was wrenching reading it. When I got proofs back from the last kind of copy editing sublimation experience had taken place and I read the story cold. I was I mean not astonished but I think that there is a way that it I integrated it in that process and probably still am. And I also have realized wonderfully that I mean I think this is one of the moment grace notes of grief is that you find the universality of the experience and the kindness of so many people. Many of who are in this room so I have I have found that I think there's a sort of shared lightness and for me in remembering Caroline that is probably I mean the one thing Freud did do really well he just may not have done it like a poem was talk about internalizing the lost object. And in fact

I I think that that is what I was able to do with this. Somebody asked me if if I totally unanswerable questions so I'll I'll ask it in case anybody is thinking somebody said What do you think Caroline would have been happy. Don't you think she would have been proud about this book or something and I said Caroline is you know that's not an answer to a question what I do think is that there is an on us miss now. Carson McCullers I was thinking about this today called it the we of me and I thought well I've created the we of me with this book. It's like I don't have to to. I think the worst part about grief is the ragged edges where you feel that you've lost even the love you had you can't find the memories or that I mean in a way the pain is like preferable to the forgetting. And so this is this lives outside of me now and it feels like by my true

self that's a really long winded answer to your question forgive me but I feel like as revealing as I've been in this book what am I going to lose. You know there's not much I missed anybody else. Yes back here Miss Michelle. How long. Got to go back rowing. Oh. No no in fact rowing was was one of the few utter solaces that I had while she was sick. And after she was gone. And in fact if people know the geography of the Charle she was in Mount Auburn Hospital and in the first few weeks I told her one of the many laughs we had in those terrible trenches when everything becomes much brighter and there's a lot of Everybody knows this it's

a E.R humor. You know I kept volunteering to go ro underneath thought windows at Melbourne and flip for her so that she could see me. You know does a calamity on the river. So I I had her boat and I rowed. I'm still rowing not as eagerly not as well as I did 10 years ago but that's been a mainstay. Michelle wants to see my arms. There was another question. Oh God. That's a really nervy question. I mean I know the person asking here in the back of the room. GEORGE CLOONEY

You deserve that. All right James I see somebody over there. Yes. Thank you oh her therapist asked me. Yes. Yes. Oh that's a yeah oh sorry. He wants to know if there's a moment in the book in which Caroline's beloved therapist and also beloved to me asked when we knew she was dying. And I he said to me. I said What do you think it was in the last maybe week of her life and he said tell her everything you haven't told her.

And I said I felt this huge relief I remember feeling tearing up and feeling this huge relief and I said there's not anything there's not anything I haven't told her. And I met them and it gives me and meant then that I knew that she knew how much I loved her of course what I didn't know is what I think happens to anybody who's been through. You know it's the old story about you have a fight with your husband and walk out the door and five minutes later one of you is gone and then there's that oh my god I wish I had. And so of course there's all of that. It's sort of messy regret and none of it is really meaningful or none of it. Yeah I think probably what I said in the book to him trumps the regret. Mostly I keep thinking that I've hauled her along with me age wise and I always one of the mysteries of time I think I guess this is less true if you lose people when they're elderly because

they're fading into that different pasture. But I keep thinking that I can't believe that I am aging and Caroline isn't. So in my mind's eye I have her. She's like in her early 50s now and I have her face and sometimes I'm rowing and I say to her out loud Oh God it's gotten really harder. Because she was a great beautiful rower. And I can still visualize her on the river. So somebody else. Yes. You want me to elaborate on the fact that grief itself was a new terrain or that the I let me make sure I got this right. The question is that I had said that

grief was not what I expected. And you want me to elaborate on that. God that's a whole other book. It's actually part of why I wrote this book. Amy asked when I started at the I years before I started this book. I told my agent that the only thing I wanted to write was a series of essays about grief and that was years before this book became evolved. But I think that that desire came from how blindsided I felt by the ravages of grief I write about this a lot in the book and and what is different. I think that I had very naively assumed that grief was sad and this times 12 you know that it was just great sorrow. There are some people in this room who helped me

enormously I have to say during those early I think that I remember to my friend Tom saying grief is like being parachuted into another country and you have to learn the language and the culture and everything else on on the run. So I was I was sobered and humbled by the overwhelming and physical and ragged nature of it and I kept thinking I mean I'm quoting myself now I remember thinking if I could just get to sorrow I could do sorrow. I mean I had this sort of romantic notion that grief was just like a lot of tears and missing somebody and not the sort of devastation that Didion writes about for instance incredibly in her book which came out after Caroline had died. And I think I read that very differently from how I would have read it earlier. And that you know Emily Dickinson I mean she talks about in fact I I

found in my old Norton's anthology we all have a musty Norton's anthology. Mine is at least 40 years old and I had started things when I was a tormented teenager and I found that beautiful line what is I don't remember the rest of it. Pain has an element of blank. It has no beginning or no end. And I had this had spoken to me when I was depressed tragic and 16 but it meant something very different when I really found it. When I was 50. So I hope that sort of an answer yes. Thank you

thank you that you know so many people miss her in so many ways. And the amazing thing to me for people who don't know this it's actually something worth knowing legacy dot com which keeps is where any obituary is posted. There are some internal web sites that stay up because somebody has funded them and there is still one on Caroline and people will still write to this day and say oh my god I didn't know she was gone or I only just found out in her book saved my life. And I've had the people I have to say this and this is not breaking I don't mean to break confidentiality it does. I've been in several cities talking to different kinds of people in the trade in publishing and bookselling and the number of people who have come up to me in the middle of talking about everything else and said and I got sober because of her book or I mean it's amazing and it and it

gives me such happiness is the wrong word. A lot of gratification to feel like that that's been I feel like I had this. I mean everyone who knew Caroline had and she was so beloved by people who did know her I think that everybody has whatever their prismatic window is and to her. But I felt like what I was able to do was that I had this piece of her that I was able to give back to the people who missed her work. The people who loved her as readers and missed her after she was gone for one thing. She was so goddamn funny. I mean when I got and you know she was hilarious and proud but she was also hilarious in person. And I when I got to write and hear her voice really hear her voice it was a joyous thing. So I'm I'm glad I get to spend a little of that back out. Thank you for what you said. Yes Julie.

Mm hmm.

Mm hmm. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you Julie so much. Thank you. Thank you. When you do make me think about how you made me think about a lot of things but

you know I think that one of the great ironies and I was thinking about this today I wrote about this a little in the book is that Caroline had lost her parents at a relatively early age as you know she was in her early thirties and both of them died one unexpectedly within six months of age or alone months of each other OCD. And I always thought that Caroline was going to teach me about grief. I always felt like it was one of the things that she knew a whole lot about. She was unfortunately a great an expert in it by the time we had become friends and I remember when she got sick and saying to her how am I supposed to do this without you you know that there was this way that I didn't have the book. Anyway that's thank you for what you said. It was song for the last act by Louise Bogan

which is exquisitely beautiful. And for a long time I had the first verse memorized. I couldn't stop remembering it. And now all I can remember is now that I have your face by heart and I then the last stanza begins and I get it. Now that I have your heart by heart it's exquisitely beautiful and I didn't know the poem until I looked for it. Yes. Well I think it would have been raw and probably lead to a lot of the insight that I simply had by the cruel bitch of time. You know I mean I think that time is for four. I was thinking about this

today. I was thinking about what what what helps what matters when people say it will get better and there's a part of you that doesn't want it to you know that time itself feels like this great intruder because then I remember the horrible feeling of my God did it now it had been a month since she was gone out had been a year. And the longer it was the further away she was. But of course it wears you down time. It's one of the many things like death that's bigger than you are. So you just have to live through it and I think that I got probably smarter and deeper and better able to think about a lot of this. Years later. It might have just been tear stained and black blurs if I had started it. I don't know. It's hard to imagine that I could have done the same job I think. Anybody else. Yes.

Alison. Thank you. It's a great mirror for me. I mean I think one of the reasons I wrote this book is that when the loved one is gone you don't have them to tell you who you are or to be. The other part of you in that relationship. And so it's always in

the you a dual memory is greatly appreciated. Thank you. Yes I do and say that there are some places in particular that I actually wouldn't go for a long time over particular places at the pond where I went only with her. And then now that I do I feel you know I used to when I would row on the river and Michelle asked me about rowing I call I called it The Church of Caroline because I felt like it was the one place where she and I really were together and there are places like that at the pond. But yes I'm I'm still there. Yeah. Yes. Not distancing.

I think that well in the sense that I think any sort of calamity sort of separates out the soldiers from the veterans you know you get a different kind of mix about the people you reach out to. I think that what happened to me was that I I had to fling my net really far and there were already some incredibly wonderful people in my life and they became more important to me in the wake of her death both because I needed them and because that space which had been singularly filled by her needed someone in it. So OK I saw somebody else didn't I. Yes. Not that I know of. I mean maybe from time to time the question was if I was going to return to reviewing

books I have to say I was on book leave when I left the globe. So it's been now a few years since I was reviewing and I have this stack of books by my bed. And I think to myself no one cares what I think about these. And I feel like I'm getting away with something. So if I do it will not. It will certainly be infrequent. But thank you for wanting me to. I appreciate that. I don't miss the weekly deadlines of reading at midnight because I have to. And then did you say one more I think. Let's do one more. No I did not know that. I I was not. I mean I knew it in terms of the mathematics of aging and grief. But I was not a window I wanted to look in. And then in the two year period of the writing of the book I knew it would be so. I mean I think this is one of the odd

things about memoir which I and particularly the closer the time period itself gets to the present. You're dealing with a really dicey like it's not like you can freeze the narrative because you know how things turn out. But there was a way that that story drove itself. So none of it surprised me by the time it appeared. I want to thank everybody for being so attentive and dear and and for being here. Thank you.