Books |
The Glen Rock Book of the Dead
Marion Winik
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Memoir
November 1: “the day of the dead”. In the Mexican/Spanish tradition, it’s the day when those who have passed on find an easier passage to visit the living. And the living do their part by visiting cemeteries and honoring their dead. It’s a spooky day.
Marion Winik was at a writers’ workshop when she read Stephen Dunn’s poem, Tenderness, Crude summary: A man learns who his lover was and what she needed long after she’s gone. Winik took “gone” a step further and thought about her friend, The Jeweler, dead for decades.
She jotted some memories and “felt my brain begin to crowd up, as if tickets to a show had just gone on sale and all my ghosts were screeching up at the box office.” She made a list of names. Then she went home to Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, woke up early, and began her daily meeting with her dead.
Recalling and recording The Glen Rock Book of the Dead was not depressing for Winik. “I have lost too many people to make talking and thinking about them an unpleasant thing to do,” she says. “Writing this book has been a chance to hang out with my friends.”
If you have read First Comes Love — Winik’s memoir about her marriage to a gay man and his death from AIDS — you may imagine what you are in for: equal parts laceration and exhilaration, 100% brilliance. To say there has never been a book like this doesn’t begin to get at my admiration for what Winik does here — I’m dazzled by the highwire act of her writing, her willingness to go deep and then go deeper, and her immense wisdom about life.
51 chapters, 96 pages. no profile longer than two pages — you could slip it in your pocket, read it in an hour. And, in that time, meet unforgettable characters. Like:
The Neighbor: a quiet kid, son of the high school principal, a suicide at 18. “Today I found his father’s phone number on the Internet, which took about ten seconds, and I called it. I told him I was thinking about his son. Because our old class is having a reunion, I said, fumbling for an excuse, I heard he died. There was a long pause. He said, yes. He did. Have fun at your reunion.”
The Virgin: a high school kid, killed in a head-on collision. ”A couple of days later half our high school is staring into an open coffin, wondering if you needed tinted aviators and an uncomfortable suit in the afterlife.”
The Driving Instructor (her father): “We used to say, Remember what an asshole he could be, but now we can’t remember that anymore. What’s left is the assholes we are.”
The Bon Vivant: “When he left us, it was like taking Saturday out of the week or May out of the calendar…”
Too many die from drugs, but they never blur. Because this is Marion Winik, there are the freak deaths — the motorcyclist whose head was snapped back by a white bird as he tooled down a mountain with his twelve-year-old daughter riding behind him. There is a second grade teacher, a peach, stolen by breast cancer. Caroline Knapp, not known to Winik, but a sister anyway. Kids, too many kids. One boy in Iraq. And near the end, one death that you don’t see coming and makes you sit back and stop, just stop.
There is no conclusion, but Winik does say this: “The only thing I knew was what I’d learned at my job writing computer manuals: when some mysterious awful thing happens and the whole document disappears, you have to open a new file and start over. That is all you can do.”
So mourn. And celebrate. Easy to get stuck in the rut of the first. Hard to balance them. Marion Winik does, and the result is so powerful that I left the book shaking. And then I made my own list.
If you have the guts to read this book — easily the most powerful document I’ve read in years — you will almost surely make your own list of the lost. You can’t not. “The Glen Rock Book of the Dead” is that haunting, that beautiful, that necessary.
To buy “The Glen Rock Book of the Dead” from Amazon.com, click here.
To read about “First Comes Love:” on HeadButler.com, click here.
For Marion Winik’s web site, click here.
