The Baltimore Book of the Dead

July 9, 2018
Winik follows her essay collection The Glen Rock Book of the Dead with this unconventional though captivating blend of memoir and biography. It’s a slim volume of remembrances of the author’s deceased friends and influences who, in one way or another, affected her. Chief among these is her mother, whose chapter is titled “The Alpha,” and Winik describes her as believing herself impervious to danger, including getting lung cancer from smoking for 65 years, which is what killed her in 2008. In “The Thin White Duke,” Winik writes of being a teenager “with mild gender dysphoria” and being captivated by David Bowie’s various personae, while in “The Artist,” she recounts taking her daughter to one of Prince’s last concerts before his 2016 death. The stories of other people are plucked from the various places the author has lived—“The Neatnik,” a young software designer who died of uterine cancer in 2013 in Austin, Tex.; two friends’ daughters, killed in car accidents in 2008 and 2012 in Texas and Pittsburgh; “El Suegro,” her son’s late father-in-law, who died from pancreatic cancer. Throughout these understated portraits, Winik writes with a delightfully light and nuanced hand.

August 15, 2018
A sequel to The Glen Rock Book of the Dead (2008), the author's previous collection of sharp-eyed memorials.Though Winik (MFA Program/Univ. of Baltimore; Highs in the Low Fifties: How I Stumbled Through the Joys of Single Living, 2013, etc.) is most widely regarded as a humorist, through her columns and NPR commentary, death has been a focus of her book projects since First Comes Love (1996). As she observes in the introduction to her latest, "death is the subtext of life, there is no way around it. It is the foundation of life's meaning and value." The author also explains that her volumes reflect chronology rather than geography; despite the title, these aren't Baltimore's deaths but rather deaths that have occurred since she moved to Baltimore from Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, in 2009. So there's plenty about her New Jersey girlhood, beginning with the opening piece on her mother and proceeding through the deaths of family members and her mother's friends. Then she moves on to her pivotal years in Texas, where she found her voice and professional identity in Austin. Winik also commemorates people she didn't know personally but whose deaths affected her and the culture deeply, including David Bowie and Lou Reed. In writing about these dozens of deaths, the author is writing about life in general, how quickly it can change and how long a memory can persist, and her life in particular, "how big ideas about art and revolution were so easily infected with the stupid romance of self-destruction." Some die without warning, as Winik writes of an unnamed friend (almost all of those who inspired these pieces go unnamed), "he was fifty-six, just like my own father who died the same way: the heart in the dark of the night that loses its way." The famous and the anonymous, the scandalous and the respectable: All get their due. For all of the variety in details and circumstance, all of the stories proceed to the same ending.Insightful pieces with a cumulative impact that wouldn't work as well standing alone.

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October 1, 2018

National Public Radio contributor, author (First Comes Love; Telling), blogger, and MFA professor (Baltimore Univ.) Winik follows up 2010's The Glen Rock Book of the Dead with dispatches from Baltimore, although the people the itinerant author memorializes come from many locations and times in her life. They range from her mother, called "the Alpha" in the first short essay, to colleagues at various jobs and writers' gatherings; friends and lovers; foes and family, spanning New Jersey to New Orleans to Texas and rural Pennsylvania; some rock gods (Lou Reed is "The Role Model"; Prince is "The Artist"; David Bowie is "The Thin White Duke," which Winik observes was a problematic personality he was fortunate to outlive); and several animals (a tribute to a goldfish is surprisingly touching). The 60-plus essays are heartbreaking, as in the death of her daughter's playmate ("The Little Bird"), her former brother-in-law, who just gave up after a drunken tumble, or others who died too soon. Additional writings are humorous or tender, offering a glimpse of Winik's own life and tremendous powers of observation. VERDICT An exquisite, quick read that most will want to reread and turn to when their loved ones are gone. [See "Editors' Fall Picks," LJ 8/18.]--Liz French, Library Journal

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