One year later, on Good Friday 1965, the three Chance kids had the day off from school and Genie took Jan to do some shopping at J. C. Penney—a new J. C. Penney, rebuilt on the site of the old one, which had been demolished after the quake.
All day, Genie felt off. That morning, after the boys left for work with Winston, she’d thrown herself into cleaning the house. She did the dishes. She did the laundry. She shampooed Jan’s hair, then her own hair, then found herself tidying room after room with increasing compulsivity. “For some reason,” she later wrote, “everything had to be clean.” Now, around three o’clock, in the Girls Ready to Wear department of Penney’s, Genie realized she’d been here with Jan at the same time last year, too: “Unconsciously, we were repeating our actions.” It was as though she’d come back to remember, to test that the orderliness of the world had truly been restored. Maybe this was how trauma worked. Maybe it didn’t knock you back, like an earthquake, but infiltrated and destabilized you slowly, like rot.
Genie took Jan home. She started cleaning again, filling the dishpan with mountainous suds just to wash a couple of drinking glasses and a coffee cup. She scrubbed and scrubbed. She turned on music, then flipped it off. It was almost five o’clock now. The house was too quiet. “I just couldn’t stand it,” she wrote.
She decided to vacuum. She started in the living room. She knew one of the boys had vacuumed there that morning, but told herself he probably hadn’t done a thorough job. As she vacuumed, she checked her watch. The time was sliding closer to 5:36, the moment of the quake. She kept vacuuming. She kept looking at her watch. Soon, she purposefully stopped looking at her watch. More time passed. Then: “I got down on my hands and knees and attacked the carpet under the sofa with a vengeance.” She was on the floor cleaning like this for a long time—until it was safe to stop. “The next time I glanced at my watch it was 5:40,” she wrote: it was over. She put away the vacuum cleaner and started supper.
Genie was no longer working at KENI. Life at the station had become intolerable for her after the quake. As the story of the disaster started to be written, Genie became one of its recurring characters. “Few Alaskans will ever forget the cool calm voice of Genie Chance,” one magazine explained. The media called her the “Voice of Hope” or the “Voice of Alaska”—a stand-in for the resourcefulness and composure of an entire state. She began receiving mail from around the country, thanking her. Governor Egan told her, “I will always remember what a grand person you were at all times, despite the continuous and tremendous pressure you were under.” An army colonel praised the “selfless devotion” with which Genie had stayed at her microphone, “even though obviously fatigued to the point of collapse.” A woman in New Hampshire explained that her little grandchildren had been so impressed with Genie when they heard her on the radio that they now danced around the house, doing a kind of modified twist they called “the Genie Chance.”
Some of the praise came laced with condescension. There was persistent, backhanded disbelief that a woman could work so hard and proficiently during a crisis. A federal official who’d listened to Genie from Washington noted that she “did indeed give lie to the expression ‘the weaker sex.’ ” Another Alaskan dignitary compared “Genie Chance’s well-modulated, calm voice” to “the tired but ever-loving voice of a mother.” The man was impressed; her broadcasts, he said, were “not the usual simpering prattle I associate with many women’s programs.”
Many of the men at KENI already saw Genie as self-important. Her fame only exacerbated that friction, widening the rift. Genie actually felt ashamed by the attention. She knew the entire staff of KENI had worked just as tirelessly, as had the staffs of two other radio stations operating in Anchorage after the quake, particularly KFQD. Besides, Genie had only talked into a microphone that weekend. Her own suffering and sacrifices were minimal, compared to those of the rescue workers and police. And unlike all those people in Anchorage whose messages she had relayed over the air, she’d known her own family was safe the whole time. She was only getting recognized for her supposed strength and courage because, she wrote, “it was my voice that went round the world.”
Genie downplayed her importance, but it was never particularly convincing. (“I don’t feel famous,” she said on NBC. She wrote to an editor in London: “Just a little old housewife and mother helping out with family finances being heard around the world? How crazy can this world be!”) She tried to disappear into her job, but her job was different now; reporting the local news in Anchorage had turned exhausting, as the city was swallowed by planning and disputes about its reconstruction. That summer, Genie lost fifteen pounds from the stress. After taking two weeks off in August, she wrote: “I can feel my emotions again.” But one of those emotions was dread: she dreaded returning to work.
She asked for a raise. She knew the reporters at Anchorage’s other stations made twice as much as she did. Her boss, however, told her she was already making the highest salary “for a woman.” The exchange convinced Genie she could never again feel fulfilled at KENI, only taken advantage of. “I was only being used because I worked hard and cheap,” she wrote. She quit that same day.
She started hustling, reviving the same entrepreneurial energy with which she’d broken into radio initially. Within weeks, Genie was taking on clients as a one-woman public relations firm. She spoke at banquets around Anchorage and emceed benefits. In May of 1965, she was flown to New York by McCall’s Magazine to receive a national award for women broadcasters called the Golden Mic, honoring her coverage of the earthquake. Wire stories about her ricocheted around the country again. The Anchorage Chamber of Commerce took the opportunity to name her its “Goodwill Ambassador” to the East Coast and furnished her with samples of Alaskan king crab, reindeer steaks, and whale meat to pass around Manhattan. The TV game show To Tell the Truth invited her on as a guest. A few months later, she flew back to New York to stage a fashion show at the Waldorf Astoria to promote an Alaskan clothing company. “Genie has some spirit!” one newspaper profile exclaimed. When she returned home to Anchorage, civic leaders began cornering her at social events, asking if she’d ever thought about running for office.
Genie was growing more comfortable with her prominence and her place in the lore of the earthquake. She’d learned how to spin and channel that reputation. She regularly claimed, for example, to have stayed on duty at KENI for fifty-nine hours that Easter weekend, with only a few intermittent snatches of sleep—which was true, but only, it seemed, if you included the hours she’d worked during the day on Friday, before the quake. Still, by the time Genie launched her first political campaign, for a seat in the Alaska statehouse, in 1966, she hardly talked about the earthquake anymore; she didn’t have to—it was an indelible part of her aura. One of her first campaign posters showed her posing in the glamorous fur-lined sealskin parka that was becoming her trademark, holding a radio microphone.
The parameters of her life were rapidly expanding. But since the earthquake, she seemed also to be privately wrestling with the conspicuous fact that she was outgrowing her husband. In one journal entry, Genie described herself as being in a class of women “who are individuals, who are independent, who love the very vibrations of life around them.” Too often, a man is attracted to such a woman solely out of an impulse “to conquer and subdue this wild creature and make her do his will.” Genie considered herself lucky: Big Winston had always allowed her to be herself. Still, she wrote, “it is unfortunate that the very man who can grant me such freedom to continue to grow and to live has no interest in continuing to grow and live himself.” But the full truth, which she apparently could not bring herself to write, was more harrowing: Winston was an alcoholic. He beat her when he was drunk.
Years later, the details of that abuse could only be reconstructed indirectly, from people close to Genie and from Winston’s own apologetic letters; not once did Genie discuss it explicitly in writing herself. It’s unclear how frequently Winston hit her, or when the violence began. Clearly, the more accomplished Genie became after the earthquake, the more Winston smoldered. She lost that first race for the statehouse, but would be elected two years later in 1968 and serve in the legislature for the next eight years. The earthquake had propelled her life, irreversibly, onto a different trajectory, while Winston remained a car salesman, scrapping to make a living. “I think, at some point, he began to feel overshadowed,” a family member would explain. It was true that Winston encouraged Genie’s ambition. But when he drank, he punished her for it, too.
The breaking point came in early 1971. That winter, Genie took Jan with her to Juneau for the four-month legislative session, while Winston stayed in Anchorage. He was convinced that Genie was cheating on him and arrived one night, unannounced, at Genie’s apartment in Juneau and began beating her furiously, grabbing her by the hair and tearing open her nightgown. Jan was fifteen years old. She hid under the covers in a back bedroom, clasping her puppy, as the violence escalated. At one point, Winston tried to throw Genie out the eleventh-floor window.
For Jan, the abuse was torturously hard to make sense of. It violated fundamental qualities of her parents that she’d always loved. Jan knew her father as a generous, affectionate man—a nurturer and caregiver; she’d adored Winston since she was a little girl. When he drank, he terrified her, but she also recognized his drinking as a sickness he couldn’t overcome. Meanwhile, Jan revered Genie for her preternatural toughness and self-possession, her relentless insistence on her own dignity—qualities that seemed irreconcilable with being victimized by a man for so long. In short, Genie had instilled enough of herself in her only daughter that Jan couldn’t understand how her mother could stay in an abusive marriage—why any woman would. Later, as an adult, Jan would press Genie for an explanation, and Genie would confess that her own feelings about Winston had been similarly confusing and fraught. She’d still loved her husband—truly. And he’d always seemed genuinely sorry afterward. Also, she was scared: Winston had once threatened to kill her, or hurt the kids, if she left him. Still, the morning after the assault in Juneau, Genie took Winston to the airport and put him on a plane back to Anchorage. She filed for a restraining order soon after and asked for a divorce.
Months of messiness and uncertainty followed. Winston turned regretful and desperate, which seemed to eat away at Genie’s resolve. “Everything I will do will be to build you up into the perfect woman you are,” he wrote to her. “Your mind and body will be all yours—you do not need to answer to me for anything.” He confessed that his pride had been hurt, but not anymore: “I would be so proud to take you anywhere and show you off, tell everyone I have the prettiest, smartest, best wife in the world.” Genie ultimately proceeded with divorce. Winston moved out. Then, one Friday night that August, he appeared outside the family’s kitchen while Genie was having dinner with another man, a gentlemanly former Speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives named Bill Boardman. Winston wrenched open the bay window, barged through it, picked up a chair, and started shaking it, yelling, “I’m going to kill you, Bill Boardman, and everyone in this house!” He eventually calmed down, sulked off; the altercation went no further. Genie married Boardman the following month.
She felt liberated. In a way, her private life was aligning, belatedly, with the air of independence she’d been projecting as a lawmaker. There were only two other women in the statehouse when Genie was first elected, and some of the men, she wrote, “seemed dedicated to proving that I was out of place.” They tended to be tough, old, and staggeringly lazy, and to regard their seats as a perk to which they were entitled after other distinguished careers. Genie made it her business to ram as much progressive legislation through the chamber as she could, and with none of the ladylike deference those men expected. (“She was not a glass of warm milk,” one lawmaker would remember.) She championed what she called “people programs,” often focusing on the needs of women, children, and other marginalized constituencies, like Alaska Natives, African Americans, and the disabled. She worked on subsidized day care, and on training police and EMTs to better assist rape victims. She had a hand in liberalizing abortion law in Alaska, three years before Roe v. Wade. In 1972, she helped get the Equal Rights Amendment ratified in the state. (“I don’t think it will change my life a great deal,” she explained to a reporter, “because I’ve gone ahead and lived my life regardless of the legislative and statutory restrictions. But it will certainly improve the rights of women all over the state.”) She started wearing a frosted-blond wig, short skirts, and fashionable knee-high white go-go boots—not just around Anchorage, but on the floor of the capitol as well. When one of her colleagues sniped at her in the hallway, explaining—loudly enough so that everyone else could hear—that his wife wore more clothes to bed than Genie wore to work, Genie wheeled around and shot back, “No wonder you’re such a grumpy old man!”
“There was a clear sense that she’d had a tragic past and now she was making up for lost time,” her legislative aide, a younger woman named Barbara Brinkerhoff, would remember. One of Genie’s touchstone issues was domestic violence, which was particularly prevalent among the military wives in her district. She worked to support the spread of domestic violence shelters around Alaska in the mid-seventies, holding low-key meetings in her living room, over drinks, to bring together advocates, social workers, and victims. Still, Genie never seemed interested, or perhaps comfortable enough, to share her own story; in public, she rarely spoke about her first marriage at all. She only wanted to know what concrete legislation and programs she could put her energy behind that would help people now.
Fifteen years had passed since Genie had reluctantly joined Winston in Anchorage, reassured by the hope that she might, at least, find opportunities on that dank frontier that were inaccessible to her in Texas. But before the earthquake, she’d seemed to only rediscover the same sexism and agonizing limitations—injustices society considered normal, or too shameful to discuss, much less resolve.
By the mid-seventies, though, Genie appeared to be finding some of the happiness and ease that had eluded her. And in the legislature, she was retroactively building the new world she’d expected to find in Alaska when she first arrived. “At the time she was doing what she was doing, it was incredible,” Brinkerhoff would remember. “She was giving younger women the opportunities she had missed. That’s the whole women’s movement, in a nutshell.”
THIS MIGHT HAVE BEEN a fairy-tale ending to Genie’s story. Except that story is fundamentally about the deceptiveness of such endings—the potential, given enough time, for circumstances that feel conclusive and stable to randomly come apart.
The first disturbances could be felt in 1976, when Genie lost her seat in the state senate to a Californian transplant named Bill Sumner. Even decades later, Sumner would be bitterly described by Genie’s political allies as almost a cartoon villain: a brazen, bare-knuckled campaigner with, as one former legislator put it, “ridiculous hair.” Meanwhile, as Sumner dragged down Genie’s legislative career, Genie’s son Al was struggling with drug and alcohol addiction in Anchorage, and her mother, Den, was succumbing to dementia in Texas. Den had violent hallucinations, tried to escape the hospital at one point, and lashed out at Genie. Genie wrote to Den, distraught and pleading: “I need your love, Mother, not your scorn…There are days I feel that if one more pressure pops up—one more unpleasant thing happens to me right now—I’ll just collapse.”
In 1985, Genie’s second husband, Bill Boardman, suffered two heart attacks. Instantly, her world reoriented, exclusively, around his care. Genie’s days became insular and lonely, wrenched by a sense of precariousness that only intensified two years later when Boardman had a stroke. Al, meanwhile, was in and out of rehab. Genie’s older son, Wins, was diagnosed with a peculiar soft-tissue cancer, which shot through his body and metastasized quickly; he died in 1990, a month shy of his fortieth birthday. Boardman passed away three years later. Al would die suddenly three years after that, in 1996, of congestive heart failure.
When it was all finally over, Jan would be the only Chance child left. She wasn’t Jan Chance anymore, but Jan Blankenship, happily married to a sweet-tempered man named Chuck. She was working for the local government in Juneau, while also raising two children and earning two degrees. (For a time, Jan oversaw the construction and maintenance of public buildings in Juneau, and would often drop her kids at day care with two baby bottles holstered in her tool belt.) Jan could remember one or two times prior to Boardman’s death when she’d caught her mother seeming momentarily disoriented or adrift. But after Boardman was gone, whatever disarray Genie’s mind had been suppressing suddenly rushed forward. Genie appeared to be changing, shedding facets of herself—nothing particularly dramatic, at first, but habits that nevertheless made her Genie Chance: She stopped mailing Jan packets of unsolicited newspaper clippings. She flew to visit friends in Toronto without leaving Jan one of her signature, preposterously meticulous itineraries. When Genie came to stay with Jan’s family in Juneau that first Christmas after Boardman’s death, Jan was shocked to discover that Genie had abandoned the elaborate facial care regimen that she’d followed every morning and night for her entire adult life. Genie insisted it was no big deal; those creams weren’t so important for your skin after all. But then Jan watched Genie’s makeup getting strangely garish, like Bette Davis’s, and noticed that Genie sometimes didn’t remove it before bed. Then Genie stopped washing her face altogether. She stopped changing her clothes. She didn’t seem distressed by any of this. That burden, instead, fell on Jan.
It took a year to get a diagnosis. By then, Genie had agreed to move in with Jan, her husband, Chuck, and their two children in Juneau. Genie’s doctor called Jan to apologize, crying. Genie had been her patient for years, the doctor explained—they’d become close—and she confessed that knowing Genie for so long as such a fiercely capable woman had kept her from registering how vulnerable she’d become. But the doctor had finally ordered an MRI, and the truth was indisputable. Genie’s condition was called multi-infarct dementia: the brain is rattled so persistently by tiny strokes that pinholes begin to open in its surface like sinkholes in destabilized ground. Even the idea of it was dismaying, this disintegration of the one reality we assume to be the sturdiest: the city of the self, built in our minds.
After the diagnosis, Genie broke apart quickly. She angered easily. She turned paranoid and hostile, particularly toward Chuck and the kids. Jan’s voice was the only one Genie seemed to trust, her source of sense-making information in a world that had scrambled. “I was her connection,” Jan would explain.
Eventually, Genie’s anger faded. She slid so deeply within herself that her mind could no longer manufacture agitation or stress. For a time, she seemed happy. Then she stopped talking.
Following the instructions Genie had left her, Jan moved her mother into the Juneau Pioneer Home, one of Alaska’s state-owned assisted-living facilities. One morning in 1998, after a caretaker at the home finished doing Genie’s hair and makeup and was leaving to fetch her breakfast, Genie looked straight at the woman, smiled, and spoke her first words in months. “Thank you,” she said. When the woman got back, Genie was dead.
Jan was angry. She felt cheated. The 1990s had been an exquisitely painful decade for her, and after the long, onerous final chapter of Bill Boardman’s life, and the deaths of both her brothers, she’d at least looked forward to finally spending concentrated time with her mother as two adults. Now that time was gone. Genie was gone. All Jan had left was a roomful of cardboard boxes—thirty or more of them, labeled year by year—into which Genie had assiduously packed thousands of letters and other documents from her life. Genie had planned to use those resources to write her memoirs, but after Boardman’s first heart attack, she’d never found the time. Jan was supposed to sort through the boxes and send anything that looked important to the university library in Anchorage. She couldn’t bring herself to do it.
Years passed—a decade, more. To everyone’s surprise, most of all Jan’s, Jan had gotten ordained as a minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA). In 2013, she was given the opportunity to lead her own church in upstate New York, and she and Chuck relocated, taking Genie’s boxes with them. Seven years later, they decided to return to Juneau and shipped the boxes back. They resettled in their old home, on a hillside overlooking town and the Gastineau Channel, and stacked the boxes in an unfinished storage room off the basement. Their two children had grown up, gotten jobs. One moved away to the Lower 48. Jan and Chuck lived quietly, mostly happily, with three dogs, two cats, and one mind-bendingly articulate parrot named Misty Grey, who lived in a huge cage behind Chuck’s recliner in the living room, absorbing dialogue and sound effects from the movies Chuck watched and regurgitating them at random. Misty Grey did an uncanny Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean. She did R2D2. She beeped like a truck backing up. And every once in a while, out of nowhere, she would call “Hell-o!” in a bracingly clear, mellifluous woman’s voice. This was the call Genie had always made, announcing herself at the front door.
Meanwhile, the boxes remained downstairs, cloistered under the action of their lives like sets from an old play stored under a stage. Jan was learning about similar cases of dementia in her family and feeling a disquieting suspicion, or even resignation, that she was probably next. This made the job of going through those boxes feel more urgent to her—but it did not make it easier. She would open one, poke around, and stop. For Jan, the boxes had become both a burden and a wound.
It was a feedback loop with no way out—until one afternoon in the fall of 2014, sixteen years after Genie’s death, a writer named Jon Mooallem called Jan out of the blue and explained that he was thinking of writing a book about the Great Alaska Earthquake and had come across her mother’s name. Did Jan happen to have any of Genie Chance’s letters or keepsakes lying around?
Yes, Jan said, and started telling him the entire story. “I became the keeper of all things Chance,” she said.
MOOALLEM WAS A WRY and sometimes laconic-seeming magazine writer with an off-kilter jaw. He was phoning Jan that afternoon from his kitchen table in the cramped San Francisco apartment that his young family was increasingly unable to fit in or afford. He and his wife had had their second child a few months earlier; there was now a crib in the living room where his desk had always been.
He was thirty-six years old that fall—born fourteen years after the Good Friday Earthquake. The quake was still the most powerful one in American history, and the second most powerful ever measured in the world, yet Mooallem couldn’t remember ever once hearing about it until recently, and only after a circuitous chain of coincidences, which were too hopelessly complicated to explain, had led him to one of Genie’s reports about its aftermath. It was enough to say—as Mooallem said to Jan on the phone—that he had discovered the earthquake, and Genie, by chance.
He started learning whatever he could about the disaster. A seven-volume study of the earthquake published in 1976 by the National Academy of Sciences had described it as “the best documented and most thoroughly studied earthquake in history,” but much of that documentation had wound up scattered, piecemeal, in arcane library collections or, like Genie’s things, boxed up in people’s basements and forgotten. Mooallem was hunting it down, and would ultimately collect, over the course of five years, thousands of pages of letters, interviews, diaries, government reports, and scientific papers, and upward of thirty hours of recordings of radio broadcasts in Anchorage. The resolution at which so many people’s lives had been captured was uncanny. The material he collected felt like a time capsule, scrupulously prepared but never revisited.
At times, there seemed to be too much. It was obvious there were far more stories than Mooallem could hope to write, and at some point, the excitement he felt at each new discovery became tinged with discouragement, or even guilt. One evening, he was finishing an interview with a former Anchorage resident, Nancy Yaw Davis, when she handed him, almost as an afterthought, her four-hundred-page anthropological dissertation documenting the experiences of people in Kaguyak and Old Harbor, two of the Native villages obliterated that weekend by tsunamis. The study, which Davis had never been able to publish, was so exhaustive and granular that it included hand-drawn maps of where in the village each individual had been that Good Friday before the quake, and what he or she had been doing: “Babysitting,” “Duck hunting,” “Playing Monopoly.”
It was equally distressing for Mooallem not to know everything. He wasn’t a historian; he was a reporter. Normally, he learned about people by talking to them and observing their lives for himself, often for days at a time. Now he was forced to cobble together a portrait of Genie, and a timeline of those first three days after the quake, from an array of discrete and disjointed perspectives, all preserved, statically, on paper. He had no way to ask those people questions, couldn’t always flesh out the context connecting their stories or probe any inferences or contradictions that arose in their accounts. It left him uneasy, insecure: ultimately, he could do only so much to check his impressions of that Easter weekend—of what should be emphasized, and what could be glossed over—against the actual lived experience, because he hadn’t been there in Anchorage himself, watching everyone live it. For him, the story of the disaster would always feel slightly set back from reality—a piece of theater, playing out behind some impenetrable fourth wall.
There were still some people around to talk to, of course. But Mooallem often worked to track down survivors of the earthquake only to wind up feeling defeated during their conversations. Early on, for example, he found Charlie Gray, KENI’s head of engineering, now a ninety-five-year-old widower living with his son in rural Washington State. Gray recalled few specifics about the quake and, moreover, seemed baffled why anyone would care. His memories of his coworkers at KENI appeared to have compacted down to a single, salient attribute of each, like ancient pictographs or brushstrokes of minimalist calligraphy—Genie Chance: “Nice-looking lady.” Ty Clark: “Good drinking man.” Gray rattled them off with his arms folded, completely unbothered, as Mooallem sprayed esoteric follow-up questions at him, queries Gray couldn’t possibly answer. Later that year, Mooallem visited Bill Davis in Sitka, Alaska. The intrepid mountaineer was eighty-eight years old and battling bladder cancer, among a raft of other difficulties, and sat in a wheelchair with a catheter bag in his lap while they spoke. His mind was sharp, though his memory was limited. Again and again, Mooallem naively double-checked some persnickety detail in one of the documents he’d brought with him and asked Davis questions like “So, you arrived at the Public Safety Building at around six on Saturday morning?” But Davis could only widen his eyes at the writer in what appeared to be bewilderment and pity.
Mooallem would experience this kind of peculiar vertigo repeatedly, all at once registering the perilous emptiness that stretched between him and those three days in 1964. Schoolkids he read about materialized as investment bankers or retired teachers. Bram’s son, Al Bramstedt Jr.—fourteen years old at the time of the quake—had taken over KENI from his father in 1971 and was already long retired. On Mooallem’s first trip to Anchorage, he found the Fourth Avenue Theatre shuttered and falling into mild disrepair as the incommunicative investment corporation that had purchased Cap Lathrop’s masterpiece took its time deciding whether to tear the building down.
It felt like time travel to Mooallem—but he was only traveling forward, and mercilessly fast, flashing ahead to watch the story lines of that Easter weekend bend toward their ultimate endings. The knowledge of where everyone would wind up tinted that history with melancholy and awe. It wasn’t a feeling you experienced in ordinary life, and Mooallem worried he’d never precisely describe it.
Then, he read Our Town, got to the Stage Manager’s first omniscient aside in Act I—“Mrs. Gibbs died first”—and said to himself: That’s me.
The boxes that Genie left behind in Jan’s basement suggested she’d anticipated this problem and worked, compulsively, to guard against it. Genie had saved virtually everything, starting with a lock of her own baby hair. There was a photo of her posing in front of the KENI Kamper with Ty Clark shortly after she started at the station, when she was known as the “Kamper Kutie”; scripts she’d written for Bram’s “News in Depth” commentaries; a reel-to-reel recording of KENI’s coverage of the 1964 Fur Rendezvous sled-dog races; a copy of her daily crime report from the Public Safety Building that Good Friday morning; and the letter she’d been typing that evening, which cut off abruptly at the start of a new sentence on the top of page four: the moment her son Wins came in, asking for a ride to the bookstore downtown. There was an envelope of photos Genie took while scrambling around the collapsing exterior of the J. C. Penney building, minutes after the quake; and pages from her reporter’s notebook from the three a.m. meeting in the Public Safety Building’s basement—where, all alone, in the center of a fresh sheet, she’d written: “The worst is yet to come.”
Mooallem found love letters from Winston, from the months before he and Genie married, stacked up and tied in lace, and a second cache of letters Winston had written twenty-four years later, pleading for Genie to take him back. After that came newspaper clippings she’d saved in the late 1970s and ’80s: articles about facelifts, and columns empowering feminists to stand up to the misogynists in their lives. (“When I began to get successful in my career, that’s when all hell broke loose,” one woman explained.) And finally, there were Genie’s diaries from the mid-1980s, a chronicle of the last fully cognizant and accessible years of her life.
At that point, Genie and Bill Boardman were spending their winters in Palm Springs. The entries started just before Boardman’s heart attacks and strokes and went through the first phases of his decline. Genie’s son Wins was sick. Her other son, Al, was in and out of a methadone clinic. She wondered, plaintively, what kind of mother she’d been, but told herself she’d done her best. She also vented about Boardman’s escalating grouchiness as his quality of life declined: how infrequently he allowed her to host dinner parties or took her out to lunch. (“I thought he was a very social person when we married,” she wrote.) Reading through box after box in Jan’s basement, Mooallem had watched Genie come so far; now he found her bristling in a condominium in Palm Springs, resenting having to cook a curmudgeonly husband three meals a day.
Genie seemed equally confounded by the turn her life was taking. She was struggling with depression again—linked, she believed, to “the feeling of dependency upon Bill’s uncertain future. When you get right down to it, none of us has a certain future. We must do with what we have available for the time being. So it’s futile to put off living for fear something dreadful will happen. That has never been me.”
In an entry from the fall of 1988, Genie described walking to the capitol building in Juneau one morning to lodge a complaint at the governor’s office. She’d read about a proposed change to the state’s ferry system, and had already phoned the governor’s transportation czar to express her disapproval. No one called her back. When she showed up at the man’s office, his assistant claimed he was in a meeting. Genie explained that she had served in the state legislature herself—three terms in the house, one in the senate. The woman at the desk absorbed this information, then told her, “Your name’s not familiar.”
“I must admit that hurt,” Genie wrote. Intellectually, she understood that so much time had passed; staffers couldn’t be expected to recognize every retired legislator’s name. Still, she wrote, “emotionally, it’s painful. You expect that when you’re dead and gone your name is forgotten.” But it was upsetting to watch her work be “relegated to the unimportant pile of deeds by anonymous persons” in real time.
As Mooallem moved through Genie’s boxes, time itself started to seem like a slow-moving natural disaster, imperceptibly shaking everything apart. Maybe nothing in our world is durable or stable. Maybe everything runs on pure chance.
He wondered how we are supposed to live on the surface of such unbearable randomness. What can we hold on to that’s fixed?