…being able to find just about anything on the Web.
In one of those weird series of mental leaps that you do when you’re blogging or tweeting or posting to Facebook or whatever—in this case it was a note on Facebook in which I was musing about whether any movie had ever gotten the essence of NYC punk right—I started thinking about one of my favorite books, Like Being Killed, by Ellen Miller. It’s a book that is, though I never met the author, essentially about me, if I had been an East Village junkie when I was in my 20s. Seriously, I have never identified with a character in a book as intensely as I did with Ilyana, the narrator of the novel, and no one has ever delineated the specific type of depression that has dominated my life as effectively or precisely as Ellen Miller did in that novel. I don’t know if she was ever a junkie herself, though clearly she at least knew a few, or if she ever suffered from depression, though her description of it is so accurate that it’s hard for me to imagine she didn’t have at least a passing acquaintance with it. And in addition to mirroring my mental state back to me, she described an East Village world that I recognized, even if I was never part of it in (at least not in the way that a junkie would have been). It’s an amazing book, one that I’ve been meaning to re-read for about a year now. (I haven’t read it since shortly after it came out, more than 10 years ago.) I used to tell people that if they wanted to understand me, they should read Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock and then come ask me why it was supposed to help them understand me. That would actually still work, but if I still told people what to do if they want to understand me, I would say that to understand me even better, they should read Like Being Killed and imagine Ilyana without the heroin.
It was a book that kept catching my eye at the library, the title undeniably intriguing. I picked it up and put it down several times, wary of anything that glorified heroin addiction (it doesn’t, it turns out), but finally curiosity won out and I checked the book out. And it floored me. It quickly became one of my five or so favorite books of all time, and I kept checking back to see if Miller had written another novel. She didn’t, and I stopped expecting her to, though every few years I would check library catalogs and Amazon to see if she had anything new out. The closest she came was a story in an anthology of “edgy” Jewish fiction, which I never picked up (but might buy now). I started to think that she was destined to be like another author, a guy named Lowry Pei, who wrote a dazzlingly wonderful novel called Family Resemblances and then apparently vanished without trace.* The fact that there’s no further work from such talented people is maddening, but somehow makes me appreciate the writing that does exist even more.
Last year, I had an urge to read the book again. It’s out of print, sadly, but I bought a used copy on Amazon for seven cents or something. And I poked around to see if I could find anything out about what she was doing–was she teaching, writing short stories, or what? Google didn’t yield much except for a bunch of reviews of the novel, and a mention somewhere of a class she had taught at the New School. Nothing else. But I guess Google has gotten better at indexing blogs, because tonight, after being reminded of the book (which isn’t a movie that gets NYC punk right, but is a book that gets postpunk NYC right), I found a handful of blog entries mourning her death from a heart attack, in December 2008, at the age of 41.
It’s not a personal tragedy for me, of course. But it’s tremendously sad to think that such a powerful, wise, original voice, won’t be heard again. And even sadder because the words of those who mourned her make her sound like a wonderful, vibrant, strong person—happier, not surprisingly, and saner and just generally better than her memorable antiheroine, and gone from the world much too soon.
It would almost be better if I didn’t know, and could still hold out the faintest hope of more words from her someday. Stupid internetz.
*Except that he didn’t; apparently he’s been teaching at Simmons and writing for many years, and now all of his work, including the entire text of Family Resemblances, is online, for free, at his site. Highly recommended.