Marjorie Williams 20 Years On

The Washington Post republishes her last column.

Alice and Will Noah celebrate her graduation from Barnard.

It’s a season of anniversaries. Thirty-four years ago yesterday I married Marjorie Williams at the Women’s National Democratic Club in Washington, D.C. Twenty-nine years ago next month our second child, Alice, was born at Sibley Memorial Hospital. In January it will be the 20th anniversary of Marjorie’s death, at home, from liver cancer, three days after her 47th birthday (also mine, a bizarre coincidence that Marjorie loathed). The Washington Post today commemorates yet another anniversary, the 20th of Marjorie’s final column for the paper, which was about readying 9 year-old Alice to venture out trick-or-treating, and the thoughts it stirred in Marjorie about make-believe and mortality. The Post republishes that piece online, with a lovely introduction by her dear friend Ruth Marcus. You can read it here.

(Yes, I know, you’re probably very annoyed right now at the Post’s opinion section in particular for bending the knee to Donald Trump. I share your fury, but urge you not to cancel your subscription, and would do so even if the Post let this anniversary pass unmarked.)

Alice and her older brother Will (about whom Marjorie wrote here) are adults now, residing in Brooklyn and Mexico City, respectively. I remarried in 2018, acquiring a beautiful, brilliant romantic partner and two delightful stepdaughters. We are all flourishing. Still, I think about Marjorie every day. Grief recedes—if its paralyzing acute phase didn’t, we couldn’t go on. But it also doesn’t, flowing into an ever-growing subterranean pool of sadness over others who’ve left us. I attended a moving memorial for one of them just two days ago. Lately I’m starting to glimpse how oceanic that invisible pool must become. What a burden. Be kind today to an octagenarian.

And please read Marjorie. Next year will also mark the 20th anniversary of the first of two posthumous anthologies of her writings, The Woman at the Washington Zoo. (Yes, I stole the title from Randall Jarrell. He was a favorite of Marjorie’s.) The collection was a surprise hit, enabling me to publish a follow-up volume, Reputation. Both books received gratifyingly ecstatic reviews. Marjorie was the sort of writer on whom, in Henry James’s famous formulation, nothing was lost. All the evidence you need resides in “The Halloween of My Dreams,” which in 2011 was voted by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists one of the top 15 newspaper columns in American history. You can read it here.