July 1, 2020
A memoirist writes to her husband to update him on her life since his death. Illness had always been part of the three-decade-long marriage between Gallagher, a former New York magazine editor, and her husband, Ben Sonnenberg, founder of the literary journal Grand Street and an Anglophile fond of bespoke Scottish tweeds. "You're marrying a cripple," he joked early in the relationship that began when they were in their 40s, referring to the multiple sclerosis that progressed from his needing a cane to "a wheelchair controlled by your increasingly hard won breath." Then came the inevitable: In June 2010, when she returned home from the pharmacy with his medicine, she found him with his "mouth slackly open, a dark stream of tea spilling down your chin. And your brown eyes, lighter and clearer than the tea, wide open, staring at nothing." He died days later. In these conversational essays, Gallagher speaks to Ben about the changes to her life in the intervening years, including her move to a two-room penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park "that would fit into our old dining room." She also writes of other memories, such as those of her mother, her mind rapidly fading, asking, "have you seen my mother?" when Gallagher visited her in a nursing home; her brief stint as a photographer in the late 1970s; and the beloved manual typewriter on which, early in her career, she wrote "dozens of articles that paid the rent" and "many drafts of my first book." Some essays, such as one on her attempts to write about an Italian anarchist, are amusing but forgettable. More powerful are passages about her husband, episodes she infuses with heartbreaking delicacy. For example, in his final days, with tubes down his throat, he still had enough wit to respond to her question, "Do you love me?" by flashing his eyebrows three times, "like Groucho Marx." A touching tribute to a beloved husband and a shared literary life.
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