I’ve seen people talk about actors and artists that had a terrible time.
My own would be Anne Rice. She wrote Interview with the Vampire after her young daughter died of Leukemia. Then her husband suddenly died of a brain hemorrhage. I suspect her Christian, anti-fanfic phase was a result of mental illness and manipulation from the publishers, although I don’t think she ever apologized.
Joan Didion. I know she wrote grief well but damn, the super harrowing deaths of her husband and daughter were a hard way to get there.
I just read the Year of Magical Thinking and it was so gut wrenching to think that after everything she described going through, her daughter then passed away half a year after the book ends…
I read “The Year of Magical Thinking” and “Blue Nights” back-to-back, and there’s a shift in tone from bewilderment to desolation as the anchors in her life were destroyed. “The Year of Magical Thinking” was dashed off in a year, while “Blue Nights” was worked and worked and agonized over. You can feel the different kinds of grief in the sinews of the text.
I also read them back to back…while I was newly married and pregnant with my eldest daughter. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.
I think she was the author I listened to at the tail end of an interview. The interviewer asked something like if there is hope after all this tragedy or something, and the author said no. Everything was bleak and awful. You could hear that sentiment in her voice.
I’m not trying to minimize her pain, but compared to a lot of others here I feel it’s much easier to cry in your mansion on the California coast with your Millions vs someone like John Kennedy Toole
This is the take I’ve had for years. It’s not flattering but it’s true. You can love someone’s work and sympathize with their pain and still call out their undeniable privilege.
I get that. I think it can be not that bad and still hurt.
I don’t think it’s even ‘not that bad’
She went through something that’s awful, I just don’t have as much sympathy as many others people have listed here.
Yeah, Joan Didion was such an incredible writer all around, and the deaths of her loved ones… you can feel her personal grief in the way she writes about them.
And as a real gut kick, not long before her daughter’s death, Joan asked her if she had been a good parent. Her daughter said she left something to be desired in that department. I can’t even imagine carrying that around.
every parent does. every parent fucks it up, sprinkles some neuroses in with the dough. it’s ok. it makes us more interesting.