The Paid Professional Codependent
DIED 2012
THAT WAS WHAT SHE called herself, the woman with the gorgeous red hair and big black sunglasses who picked me up at the airport for the Bay Area portion of my book tour. She looked more like a country rock star than a media escort. In fact, she was both, as well as a radio producer, a columnist, and the organizer of the Rock Bottom Remainders, the famous-author band of Stephen King, Amy Tan, Dave Barry, et al. Why do you think I bothered writing a book at all, if not to become a go-go dancer for this band? On the way to my first interview that morning, we stopped for espresso at a place with Latin music. Watch this, I told her, leaping from my stool to demonstrate my hip-swiveling abilities.
Essentially, a media escort is your best friend for one day. And just one day with this best friend was all I needed. The Rock Bottom Remainders had a show coming up over Memorial Day weekend at a book-sellers’ conference at the Hollywood Palladium, and somehow this stop got added to my tour and I ended up onstage performing with all of the above, plus Roy Blount, Matt Groening, Cynthia Heimel, and Bruce Springsteen. Who else could have done this for me but her? But she would do more. The next time I went on a book tour, a couple years later, I had dragged my food-writer boyfriend along and it was my birthday and unbelievably we found out in the middle of it that one of our best friends had committed suicide. What a day that was. Thank God we had a paid professional codependent, the best in the business, to get us through it.
It was shocking to read that she had died of breast cancer at sixty-three. Her sixty-three was most people’s forty. According to the New York Times, she was surrounded by authors, among them Ms. Tan, Mr. Barry, Ms. Angelou. Ms. Collins called on the phone and sang “Amazing Grace.”