Why We All Should Have a “Good Art Friend”

His memoir began when he was a child, watching his father die young. Mine started when my young children learned their father died by suicide. We were drawn to each other’s perspectives, thought they could inform our own. In a writing class, students often make alliances such as these, friendships based on narrative bonds and stylistic affinities. In our very first Zoom meetings, amidst other students writing through their particular losses—children of Holocaust survivors, a former cult member, sufferers of schizophrenia and poverty—Doug and I quickly saw that we could be a perfect editing match.

In the nearly four years I knew him, we sent more than 600 emails back and forth. The first one from him with feedback about my memoir, Us, After, began this way:

​​Dear Rachel:

Thank you for sharing this. My mother was widowed a week after I turned 12, about the age Sophia was, and any story about a mom trying to raise her children by herself absorbs me. I thought a lot about her while reading your story…

Then he launched into editing my book, which is about rebuilding life with my daughters, who were 8 and 11 at the time of their father’s suicide:

I think your memoir would benefit from a clearer, stronger story arc. This is something I have been struggling with in my own manuscript (as you shall soon see), and it often feels like trying to get a double mattress up the stairs by myself…

He went on, over three full pages, to offer incisive, bullet-pointed questions on structure and stakes, recommend craft books and a couple of videos to consult. Attention such as this tends to make me swoon: How often are our words and thoughts attended to in such intimate ways?

Doug was not my lover, of course, nor a relative, or lifelong friend. He was not a child, beloved pet, or any relation who might typically elicit such deep, enduring adoration. Yet I loved him. He was my writing friend and we complemented each other in dynamic ways: he was a methodical, precise, organized writer who brought taming tendencies to my flourishes. I urged him to loosen up, get feely, introduce more interiority (maybe even a sex scene) to his taut, polished prose.

During the year of our intensive memoir class, a story in The New York Times titled, “Who Is the Bad Art Friend,” ripped through the tight-knit Boston writing community with accusations of plagiarism, white privilege and betrayal. This was when I began thinking of Doug as the very opposite—my “good art friend.”

After our writing class ended, Doug and I formed a little writing group with two other memoirists. We’d meet every other week online to help each other muddle through; we cheered for acceptances and, more often, consoled each other after rejections. Doug’s leukemia had been in remission when we first met; but then it roared back. During this time, he’d often attend the group from a hospital bed, responding to nurses off camera between thoughts on our writing.

Last year, when he was hospitalized, yet again, for a raging infection of unknown origin, he wrote us emails about his treatment, which sounded like a form of Medieval torture, notably a procedure involving the excruciating scraping out of a fungal infection in his sinus cavity.  “As a trick of last resort,” he wrote, “they basically put a balloon up my sinuses—with a valve that felt like having a fire hydrant up one nostril. That stopped the bleeding but caused immense pain for 2-3 days.” One of his doctors told him this could be the infection that killed him.

At that point, I became obsessed with one thought: telling my friend I loved him. But saying, “I love you, Doug,” seemed so terribly awkward. Despite our near daily communications by this time, I didn’t actually know Doug in any traditional sense. I’d met him in person only twice. So, I didn’t have a clear sense of his gait or how tall he was or the daily flow of his work life. I did know, from his writing, that he met his wife at a fish restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan; that he had a temper and could lash out viciously; that his favorite moments were spent sugaring on the family farm in Western Mass., and his deepest fear was the hole his death would leave for his children—the same emptiness his father’s death left for him.

What was the nature of this writerly love, I wondered, where you know but also don’t know.

Doug kept his laptop with him in the ICU until the day of his death. And he continued his generous editing. “I like how the opening sets you up for the forking that happens later on,” he wrote eight days before he died, offering me notes on a new essay. “I suggested some edits to increase tension in the first section.” Lean into the two forks, he offered, accentuate the longing for the path not taken, and our collective cluelessness about the trajectory of life.

And I suggested edits back to him. We were able to pull-together an essay, excerpted from his memoir. After he died, on October 18, 2023, our writing teacher read the essay aloud at a bookstore event with his wife and three children in attendance. The Boston Globe published that piece to wild, aching praise.

The author Leslie Jamison wrote about her experience completing a novel by her friend Rebecca Godfrey, after Rebecca died. “I knew at once that I would say yes,” Jamison wrote in The New Yorker. “Not because I felt any particular sense of confidence but because I was fully committed to trying. There are so few things we can do for the dead; this was something I could do for her.”

I wanted to do something for Doug too. This was how our relationship worked and he had already done so much for me: suggesting changes to a Tiny Love Story I’d submitted to The New York Times that made the piece, eventually published, so much better. And he’d helped me bring my memoir to life on the page, reminding me of the immersive experience readers require, the little cinematic moments that make you want to stick with a story, far beyond simply well-reported facts. “Here’s where one of your little movies would work,” he wrote, flagging a section about my husband using a plastic wand he kept in the car to make giant bubbles for our kids.

In the end, I did get to tell him I loved him, loved our writing relationship. He said he felt the same way. And while I still have a circle of writer friends to call for emergency editing and reality checks on chapters, none are so unstinting and astute as Doug. He was able to see what I was trying to achieve in a sentence, a word choice, and had the capacity to point me in the right direction.

Like Jamison’s writer friend had done for her novel, Doug left detailed instructions on how to complete his memoir. This was a man who ordered each chapter onto color-coded index cards, with different shades for emotional valence, character arc and sensory details. In his final organizational feat, he left names and contact information for people who could help finish his book. I saw my name and felt the dread of loss: “Rachel Zimmerman… has been reading versions of this and discussing it with me for four years. She understands my writing very well.”

He’d instructed us that the book should end with the “Pignoli” chapter and I knew exactly what he wanted. It’s a scene with Doug and his wife out to dinner, at the restaurant Pignoli, on a rare evening without kids or responsibilities. Underneath, it’s about seizing moments of pleasure; the shared history of couples who may feel old, but really are still young.

And that, I think, was the essence of our writing friendship. Time stopped when we offered each other notes. We’d embodied one another’s characters so fully, knew their desires and fears, that we became momentarily free of our own bodies, the ravages of aging and illness and worry. It was all about the work, the pages, the passages that kept us alive.

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Us, After: A Memoir of Love and Suicide by Rachel Zimmerman is available from Santa Fe Writer’s Project.