DIED 2002
WE WERE THE SAME age, we went to the same college, we both wrote for alternative newspapers, and we each, in 1996, published a memoir about our troubles so far. I did heroin, she drank vodka; I had bulimia, she had anorexia; I was widowed, she was in recovery. First I heard of her was when her book arrived on the New York Times bestseller list, “a remarkable exercise in self-discovery.” Mine was too, sort of, “if you can imagine Edie Sedgwick mutating into Donna Reed.” I stared at her author photo—her high, clear forehead, her mane of blond hair. The beginning is terrific, I told people after I’d read it, the stuff about the glasses and the ice cubes and how much she loved to drink, but after she got sober, it was kind of boring. Could you tell those boyfriends apart? My next book was about single motherhood; hers about how much she loved her dog.
When I heard the eulogy on NPR, saw the obituary in the Times, I was blindsided. Lung cancer, forty-two, are you kidding me? Now she was on my mind even more of the time. When I fell in love with a miniature dachshund a couple years later, I finally read her chronicle of interspecies passion, but all I could do about it now was hug my dog. That summer I was back in Providence where we’d both once gone to school. It was June and the students were moving out, their belongings in piles on the sidewalk. There among the stereo speakers and economics texts, I found a miniature Blue’s Clues armchair for my daughter and, on the ground beside it, a paperback copy of Drinking: A Love Story. I snatched it up and hugged it as if it were written by my sister. The one I never met.