Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Touring for a book I didn't write:

I've been touring the country lately promoting a new book. Nothing unusual about that, but I happen not to be the author of the book I'm hawking. Its author is my wife, Marjorie Williams, who died this last January of liver cancer.

The book, titled The Woman at the Washington Zoo, is a collection of her writings, many of them previously published in the Washington Post, Slate, and Vanity Fair, and a couple of them previously unpublished. In the introduction, I state that editing the book—which I did in the months after Marjorie died—was an act of mourning. This is particularly manifest in the final section, which consists of essays Marjorie wrote about her illness and her thoughts about impending death. As you might imagine, I am still very much consumed by—sometimes paralyzed by—grief.

11:45 AM