The violet hour katie roiphe biography
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The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End
Roiphe was a sickly, morbid child. After a serious, extended case of something like pneumonia, she had half a lung removed, and her chosen reading was books about Armenian genocide. Although she was convinced she was going to die at 12, it was only a blip; her next significant encounter with death was her father’s cardiac arrest at age 82. Once again, she was utterly unprepared. In investigating six great authors’ deaths, Roiphe is not so much looking for sage tour guides to the underworld as asking how one faces and narrates death.
To start with I was skeptical about Roiphe’s set of chosen writers. Between Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak and James Salter there’s no class or racial diversity, and the gender balance is poor. Yet as I read on I set these quibbles aside. There are literally hundreds, maybe thousands of subjects Roiphe could have chosen, so in a sense the particular authors discussed here are arbitrary. She’s eschewed more obv
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Death surrounds me – a massacre of grandparents, fathers and mothers, friends, childhood playmates, aunts, uncles and cousins and pets. They die in car accidents, of heart failure, of cancer, of bad luck and worse luck.
This September, they’ll die again, in equal numbers with grisly fates.
I considered this grim relationship while reading Katie Roiphe’s THE VIOLET HOUR, an elegiac and sprawling examination of the last days and hours of six legendary writers. Sigmund Freud, for instance, suffering from throat cancer. He asks his friend Max Schur to administer a fatal dose of morphine. “It is only torture now,” he said, “and it has no longer any sense.”
To face that decision with crystal clarity, Roiphe writes that Freud had refused any painkillers except aspirin – despite suffering from a half-amputated jaw.
Roiphe presents authors sensing or fighting the last sentence of their story. Dylan Thomas brags about a night of 18 whiskeys – “a personal record.” Maurice Sendak nods “yes” in a hospice bed. Susan Sontag asks for any cancer treatment, every treatment, each more painful and horrific than the next.
If we’re being honest, we all want death to come without warning or awareness – a light abruptly shaded by a drawn curtain. Or if we see it coming, then to choose th
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The Violet Distance by Katie Roiphe
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