A Last Look at Fifty-One Lives: Marion Winik, "The Glen Rock Book of the Dead"

The Glen Rock Book of the Dead by Marion Winik

Back when I first moved to Austin, Texas, I already knew about the little band of local celebrities. Where most of the locals kept their eyes peeled for Matthew McConaughey or Sandra Bullock down on 6th Street or watched for Willie, Jerry Jeff, or Marcia at the Broken Spoke; I was a little different. When browsing the shelves at Book People or fondling the produce at Whole Foods or Sun Harvest, I always kept one ear open, listening for a distinctive velvet growl. The Austin celebrity I was always hoping to meet was Marion Winik.

Alas, Marion moved away from Austin; and a few years later, so did I. Not long after she left, the frequency of her commentary on NPR's All Things Considered dwindled and I heard that voice redolent of whiskey and cigarettes no more. Widowed in 1994 (the story she spins out in First Comes Love), Winik remarried some six years later, moved to small-town Pennsylvania, and began a new phase in her life - perhaps even growing up just a little... but she still writes, thank the Lord, as she proved with her 2005 collection of essays titled Above Us Only Sky (the title’s from John Lennon’s “Imagine”). After a three-year hiatus, Winik returned with a vehicle that’s a little bit spiritual, a little bit weird, a little bit funny – and a whole lot of interesting.

In her latest, a tiny volume that might well be described as Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology as told by a female Jack Kerouac, Winik shares fifty-one vignettes of people (mostly) she has known; people who have since “moved on.” They’re dead – hence the title, The Glen Rock Book of the Dead, a riff on the Tibetan Book of the Dead cross-bred with Winick’s post office address in southeastern Pennsylvania. Just as the deaths of those we know leave the survivors feeling the full spectrum of emotions, Winik manages to share that same breadth of experience. No matter whether she’s writing about her cat, her father, or her son’s second-grade teacher, she manages to capture not just the essence of the dearly departed but also the fundamentals of her understanding of the person and his life. Some deaths left her sad, a few left her puzzled – and at least one left her angry that she could no longer berate the deceased.

Most of the fifty-one subjects are identified not by name, but by some characteristic that defined their relationship. Her first husband, Tony, is The Skater; her father, The Driving Instructor. Many of the characters who’ve passed through Winik’s tumultuous life will be familiar to those who’ve read her memoir or her collections of essays including The Skater and his friends, all dead of AID;, and The Clown, dead by his own hand in Austin. An ominous number of Winik’s friends from her twenties and thirties (and perhaps forties) died of overdoses (though one died when hit by a bird while motorcycling in Mexico). The Glen Rock Book of the Dead isn’t all dark and dreary, however: Marion shares many a pleasant memory – there’s a paean to the insouciant King of The Condo (an Austin alley cat named Rocco); and then there’s a memorial to a little pink house at Catina and Moulton in New Orleans, casually killed by that bitch, Katrina.

Perhaps the most poignant is her vignette of The Competition, a fellow memoirist with whom she shared an alma mater and a messy life – except that she’d never met the woman, didn’t know her from Eve...

When I heard the eulogy on NPR, saw the obituary in The Times, I was blindsided. Lung cancer, 42, are you kidding me? Now she was in my mind even more of the time, When I fell in love with a miniature dachshund a couple of years later, I finally read her chronicle of interspecies passion, but all I could do about it now was hug my dog. That summer I was back in Providence where we’d both gone to school. It was June and the students were moving out, their belongings in piles on the sidewalk. There among the stereo speakers and economics texts, I found a miniature Blues Clues armchair for my daughter, and on the ground beside it, a paperback copy of Drinking: a Love Story. I snatched it up and hugged it as if it were written by my sister. The one I never met. [Caroline Knapp, author of Drinking: a Love Story and Pack of Two, died in 2002. She and Winik never met.]

You might think the subject odd; you might be put off by the references to homosexuality and drug use. You might merely think, who cares about her optometrist, who died when she was eleven? So what if her first father-in-law was a Quiet Man? Why should we care about the deaths of her second husband’s three brothers? We’ll not go all John Donne on each other here – let’s just acknowledge that Marion Winik has the skill, the words, the heart to make us care about these people.

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