(Not) Another Corinna Post (6): Corinna, Jill, Jane, and Me, but Mostly Me

If you’re new here, welcome! You might want to take a look at the previous Corinna posts to get your bearings. But I promise I’ll be back to incisive literary, cultural, and political analysis next week—or at least funny stories with no dead people.

My daughter made this poster of Corinna’s house for a tag sale in preparation for putting it up for sale. Let me know if you’re in the market for a great house in Flatbush.

I wasn’t going to write a post this week. I’ve been super busy with work. There’s an idea that’s been rattling around in my head for a couple of weeks, but I have to finish a book and a TV show before I can write it. I thought I was done with Corinna posts, or maybe I hoped I was done with Corinna posts. Nothing else came to mind that seemed worth the effort.

Then this morning I happened to read an article that’s been open on my phone for maybe a week, an old essay by Jill Lepore called “The Lingering of Loss.” The first sentence of the subhead is “My best friend left her laptop to me in her will,” so clearly I had opened it for a reason. However, in the interval I had forgotten, and when I clicked on the article, my phone displayed the first paragraph, which was about snowsuits, so I didn’t have the opportunity to be reminded of its actual topic.

The second paragraph was about sewing a snowsuit when she was pregnant with her first child, to which I responded (in my head), for god’s sake, Jill Lepore, you sew too? Did you know she also gardens? Along with writing more researched books than anyone you know? Not to mention the New Yorker articles? And not only that, but they’re all so good? And not only that, but I feel no jealousy or resentment whatsoever because she is such a brilliant lovely unicorn? But the sewing? That seemed a bit much.

In the third paragraph, she writes about the baby’s birth, which was when I realized why I must have clicked on the piece to begin with: “When I was trying to deliver him, my best friend, Jane, was on her deathbed, more than a hundred miles away.”

I am writing this paragraph at 10:13 am. I read the essay a little past six this morning. In that time, I not only misremembered its title,¹ but I misremembered the paragraph that made me think of Corinna. Clearly I was resisting my fate. I thought it was a paragraph with a list of things about Jane. But actually it’s a paragraph that begins with how Jill met Jane, segues to how easily and widely Jane made friends, and only then gets to the litany of things about her.²

It was the list that made me think of Corinna. Perhaps I skimmed over the part about how they met because I don’t remember meeting Corinna. She is nowhere in my memories until third grade when we both switched into the same new school, and then there she simply is: at school, at home, everywhere, all the time. Yet I still read the second half of that paragraph about Jane and wondered whether I could write such a list for Corinna, a litany of the little things about her, like Jill writes of Jane: “She had a crush on John Cusack. She loved to run. She drank coffee at any hour. She adored Jane Smiley. She was terrible at tennis.”

Then I though I should try:

She was the first to wear jelly shoes, carry a lunchbox as a purse and, decades later, embrace old lady shoes. She loved Humphrey Bogart. She cooked full meals when she ate alone, even a sauce for her steak. She played soccer with the boys in middle and high school. She was a bag lady, never a suitcase, always varieties of tote bags, at least two for an ordinary day, four or five for a weekend trip, though I don’t know how she managed it on airplanes, but she did. She rode her bike around Brooklyn. She knew all the obscure restaurants and markets, and they were always that good. She loved the banya. Her favorite song from Saturday Night Fever was “Native New Yorker.” She made Spotify playlists for everything, from Haydn to free jazz to white country soul. She loved to do the freak. She put blue streaks in her hair for high school graduation. She was an excellent gossip.

OK, I guess I could.

But back to Jill and Jane. Jane couldn’t finish her dissertation. and she got depressed, and then she got cancer and died. Which is why Jill writes the way she does:

How do you do it? people sometimes ask me, people often ask me, people always ask me. And why: Why the books? Why the babies? Why the essays? Why so many, why so fast? What’s the rush? Where’s the fire? Jane is the how, the why, the rush, and the fire. She never got to do any of the things we both wanted. Only I did.

This paragraph makes me like her even more and feel even more different from her. I have that rush, that fire, but for me it’s been to change the world, to teach, to make things better for people I love, to read. I don’t know if I have it for writing.

Corinna had it for music, for sure. She was a hard worker and proud of her career, she loved her family, but she was laser-focused on her music. If there was an opportunity to play, she grabbed it. If there was a potential opportunity, she made it happen. Her music was social, which in a way made it easier because it was a commitment to others, not just herself. And it was deeply connected to her family history and even her scholarly work, which furthered the compulsion. But she also simply chose music over many other things.

I believe that what you actually do shows what matters to you.³ When we all had kids at home, my friends marveled at how I found time to exercise, but one reason was that I cared not one single whit about cooking for my family. I dutifully fed my children, but it was all about the bottled spaghetti sauce and quesadillas. That gave me the half hour to go for a run.⁴ Even today, I often choose exercise, reading, my family, my friends over writing. And, indeed, those things matter to me enormously.

On the other hand, I am sitting here now, writing these words, when I was supposed to be following up on last night’s board meeting and editing a case study for a client. So I suppose it matters, but not enough for all the books I could have written and haven’t…yet. Some of them even exist, at least their beginnings, on scraps of paper, in my email drafts where I often start to write, even in folders full of chapters on my computer. But clearly there were too many times when going to yoga or climbing a mountain or reading or watching TV with my kids mattered more than they did.

The other thing about Jane is that she died in her 30s, when she should have been - and Jill was - just revving up. This means she didn’t get to do the things she most wanted to do, which were write and have children. Jill could do both, so she did it for both of them.

Corinna died when we were 59, and I’m not sure what I could do for both of us. We were different, and she did her spectacularly. I’ve done me pretty well too - she would say spectacularly, but she would know that I could never say spectacularly about myself. I don’t know that she would say spectacularly about herself either. That’s why we needed each other. But I know that one thing she wanted me to do is accept myself for who I am. So maybe I can try to do that for her. And who I am is the person spending a Friday morning writing, even if I’m not - and don’t want to be - Jill Lepore.

Because we still deserve nice things…

This week’s nice thing is small children out in the world in springtime. Especially for those of us who don’t have small children at home.

New babies in carriages are the best, but so are toddlers, like the three year old at the Lebanese takeout place when we were all waiting for our food. He kept escaping his mother, peering around my husband, and blowing raspberries in response to the faces I made at him, to his and my utter delight, even as his mother desperately tried to grab him back.

Parents of small children: I know they make you crazy, and I know people can be mean, but keep in mind that some of us are deriving great pleasure from their very existence…and, providing all works out as it should, some day you will be us, and it will be nice.⁵

1. Until I opened the essay on my other monitor so I could refer to it as I wrote, I thought it was called “Deadline,” which honestly would have been a better title, in fact I was planning to comment on it, not that I know better than Jill Lepore, but “The Lingering of Loss” is so…predictable.

2. I finished a book review yesterday in which I used the word litany twice, and earlier in the week I clicked on a folder on my computer called Poems, even though I haven’t written poems for decades, and it had one poem called “Litany” about all the ways I do not sleep, which are legion…it must be a litany kind of week, though I certainly didn’t plan it that way. Then again, I didn’t plan to write this post

3. I’m not going to get into addictions or how these days our phones do keep us from doing what we want to do, but please know that I thought of it.

4. If you tell me Jill Lepore runs marathons I will break things. But also some people just have more energy. And that’s great for them.

5. Addendum to parents of small children: I am absolutely NOT saying you should appreciate these days, because they often suck. I’m saying that there are other realities out there, including other perspectives on your children at even the suckiest moments - including people who are sympathetic when your children are at their worst behaved and you think the rest of the world hates you. And some day you will get to be those other people.