The Corinna Posts 5: We Were Never Perfect

Apologies for two Corinna posts in a row, but sometimes things just happen, which is kind of how this post happened.

How I knew Love Story until the other night

I watched the last three episodes of Dying for Sex while ironing, and by the end of the evening, I realized I had made a terrible mistake.

Not the ironing, which needed to be done and I had finally done it. Not even Dying for Sex, though it did irk me. But I don’t know what I was thinking when I started immersing myself in cancer journeys with friends, which was neither my goal nor my point.

I didn’t even realize I was doing it. Glennon Doyle and Hanif Abdurraqib recommended Dying for Sex, it got good reviews, it stars Michelle Williams who is always good, it has Rob Delany who I always love…but somehow, I did not consider the fact that it was about a person dying of cancer and her best friend.

Sometimes I am an idiot.

But there I was watching it, and it was good. I wasn’t crazy about the internal voiceover, but I understood the artistic choice. Jenny Slate pretending to speak French was a highlight. Rob Delany was outstanding. Sissy Spacek was great. And Michelle Williams was of course excellent: luminous, literally, with her close-cropped halo of golden hair and porcelain face of refusal, insight, and desire; emotionally nuanced; disappearing into the part as she perfectly embodied this very specific dying woman.¹

But it was also another story of the perfect dying woman (this time with kinks), her perfect death, her perfect friendship, and happy resolution all around (aside from the death, of course). We’ve seen this before, and we know how I feel about it.

So I decided I had to watch Love Story because I was pretty sure it was the definitive perfect death of the perfect dying woman story, and if I was in for a dime, I might as well be in for a dollar. I’d never actually seen Love Story, but the Mad Magazine parody is seared into my brain. Sure enough, it was exactly as Mad Magazine depicted it.

Ali McGraw veers from robotic to endearing with no apparent method to the madness (also from independent Cliffie to New York housewife with equally little method, aside perhaps from exhaustion due to supporting her husband through law school and the cancer nobody knows she has). Ryan O’Neal is fully Oliver Barrett, except for the occasional hint of class-inappropriate Boston accent. There’s so much Harvard. So much frolicking in the snow. So much overcoming of obstacles, until you start waiting for the obstacle that will not be overcome. And then it happens so smoothly, so euphemistically. She is so beautiful and loving and apparently free from pain on her deathbed. After all, this is the movie that brought us the lie that “love means never having to say you’re sorry” (as we all agreed at a dinner party last night, love actually means always having to say you’re sorry).²

Of course there’s no friend in Love Story, just a perfect husband. But then I thought of Little Eva (Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and Beth (Little Women, duh), and realized that the trope of the perfect dead girl (and its subgenre, the perfect dead mother) is ubiquitous in western culture, and not a cultural or analytic path I need to take.

Of course a distinguishing factor in We All Want Impossible Things and Dying for Sex is that they are cultural representations based on real people, real friendships, and real dying, which is one reason all the perfection irks me. Catherine Newman constructed the perfect Ali. Nikki Boyle played a role in constructing the perfect TV Molly (after she and Molly constructed themselves in the Dying for Sex podcast on which the TV show is based).³ As I’ve said, it’s one way of doing elegy.

But Corinna wasn’t perfect, I’m not perfect, our friendship wasn’t perfect, and I can’t do that kind of constructing, which means I can’t write honestly about our friendship, at least in public.

Corinna was complicated. ***

Those asterisks were originally a bunch of sentences about all the ways Corinna was complicated, which is itself a euphemism. The original version of this paragraph began, “But I don’t want to write about any of this.” Then I decided I didn’t even want to write those sentences.

I’m pretty sure Mary Karr would have told me to keep the sentences and write some more.⁴ But I’m not Mary Karr. I don’t want to hurt Corinna’s family, whether by making public things they know or revealing things they don’t. Corinna had oceans of friends who adored her and still do, and they don’t need that either. She had acolytes, for god’s sake, and I don’t want to tip her off their pedestals. I mean, in some ways I do, because I greatly prefer the real complicated Corinna to their perfect Corinna, but also I really don’t.

Being a friend is a lot of responsibility, even when your friend is dead. I suppose this might even be how the real Ali and Molly ended up so perfect on page and screen.⁵

On the other hand, I’ve had novelist Ann Patchett’s memoir, Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, on my desk for months now. I read it when it came out, and in my recollection, she lays it all on the table: how much she loved poet Lucy Grealy and how terrible Grealy could be. Part of me feels like I should hold off on finishing this post until I’ve reread it, but more of me wants to put this to bed.

I know friendship. I know friendship in duress. I know I’m a good friend. Corinna, for all her euphemistic complexity, was a good and essential friend to me. And then she got cancer and died, but I don’t need other people’s versions of that part of the story to validate me and our story.

What I’m still curious about, however, is what it means to have lost a friend. That’s where I started, that’s how I got to elegy, and then I went down an elegy path that didn’t give me what I needed. Except maybe it did give me one piece of clarity: for me, losing a friend can’t mean smoothing the rough edges. But I also need it not to mean keeping myself snagged on those rough edges.

I don’t know where I go from here. Maybe it’s time to reread In Memoriam. Maybe it’s time to reread the 40+ pages about Corinna I wrote for myself. Maybe it’s time to do something altogether different. Or maybe I’m done.

But I have a feeling that whenever I say maybe I’m done, it means that I’m not.

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Because we still deserve nice things…

A nice thing is sending someone a surprise book in the mail. Another nice thing is getting a surprise book in the mail. So if you send a someone a book, you are creating double nice, for you and for them, with triple nice if they have never gotten a surprise book in the mail. And bookshop.org (or your favorite independent bookstore’s website) makes it so easy! Which also means you’re not using Amazon, so you have potential for quadruple nice, and how can anyone (who cares about books) resist that?!⁶

1. Although the very specific Corinna parallels were there again: dumping her husband after her diagnosis, finding new love, and of course the friend, though chaos agent Nikki was definitely not me. I swear I’m not seeking these parallels, even though I seem to keep finding them.

2. I could go on at length about Love Story, which I really did love. I wonder if I would have loved it or found it ridiculous if I were in my 20s or 40s or 60s in 1970. But today it is a 55-year-old classic, which turns all its awkwardness and euphemism into nostalgia. Also today I see Oliver as in the wrong in so insistently rejecting his father, who is imperious and controlling but also trying hard in his own way to love and support his son, but is this because of the movie or because I am now the parent? Ah, the mysteries of culture and time. I’m certain, though, that I would have loved all the 1960s Cambridge as much in 1970 as I do now. And Emerson Hall as Barrett Hall was a delightful surprise. And secretly what I really want in a friend is someone who can join me in reciting the “What can you say about a girl who died?” opening lines.

3. See this article in New York.

4. I might be wrong about this. I would swear that somewhere she says something along the lines of if you want to write memoir, you can’t worry about other people. But I just spent ten minutes scrolling Mary Karr quotes and didn’t find it, so maybe it’s someone else, or maybe I made it up out of the need for a straw woman against which to justify myself.

5. The New York article suggests this was very much the case for Molly: “[Molly’s] memoir runs directly perpendicular to the podcast in tone — it’s raw, often angry, unvarnished. ‘I think the book was the wounded parts of her,” says Boyer. “I think the podcast was the truest version of her. And then, when I see Michelle play her, that’s how Molly would love to be seen.’” And it was apparently also the case for her actual death, which is barely visible on TV: “Boyer became one of her full-time caretakers: washing her face, massaging her legs, bringing her soup, sitting with her as she writhed in pain.”

6. This nice thing is brought to you by receiving a surprise book in the mail and sending a surprise book in the mail in the space of two days.