The Women at the Washington Zoo
Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate
by Marjorie Williams, Edited by Timothy Noah
List Price: $14.95
Pages: 384
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 1586484575
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Marjorie Williams was born in Princeton, NJ in 1958 and died in 2005. She is survived
by her husband, Timothy Noah, senior writer at Slate, who edited this volume,
and her children, Alice and Will.
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10 Questions with Timothy Noah
In the fall of 2005, PublicAffairs published The Women at the Washington Zoo,
a collection of the journalism of Marjorie Williams, a Washington journalist who
had died of cancer in January of that same year. Timothy Noah, her husband and a senior writer at the online journal Slate, selected and edited the essays for this book. Carla Cohen talked to Noah
about the life and work of Marjorie Williams.
CC: When I read this book I felt like I had a new friend in Marjorie Williams.
I had read many of the pieces over the years, but when they are assembled in one
place, and you read them at more or less the same time, you see the journalist
at least as clearly as the subjects. She must have been uncommonly smart and clear-eyed
to write such perceptive pieces.
TN: A number of journalists I know, people who admired Marjorie and read her pieces
when they came out, said that only now, on rereading them, did they see how well-crafted
they were, and how much they expressed the sensibility of the writer. In Washington,
information tends to be skimmed—especially political information. So I think
the strong literary and personal quality of her work wasn't fully appreciated
until it was put between hard covers. I've heard many people marvel at the intimate
quality of Marjorie's writing, even when she was writing on impersonal topics.
CC: This book has been an unexpected success. Public Affairs had to print more
copies and the book is being purchased throughout the country, not simply in Washington.
Collected nonfiction essays are generally a hard sell. Why do you think The Woman
at the Washington Zoo fared so well?
TN: Partly, I think, it reflects baby boomers' newfound interest in the topic
of mortality. It's been widely noted that 2006 is the year the first baby boomers
will turn 60. Much of Marjorie's book is about the liver cancer that killed her.
Marjorie writes about her illness, consciously, from the perspective of a cancer
patient who wants to explain to a healthy person, as concretely as possible, what
it feels like to be dying. I think the success of Joan Didion's new book, The
Year of Magical Thinking—whose sales apparently surpass anything Didion
wrote previously—also reflects baby boomers' interest in death (in this
instance from the perspective of one who is grieving). Carole Radziwill's book,
What Remains—which I haven't read—is another book about grief that's
been selling very well.
But that only partly explains the book's success, and it's a fairly reductive
explanation. I think readers are responding powerfully to Marjorie's voice—to
the vividness and the strong appeal of Marjorie's personality. In the book's introduction,
I invite readers to experience "the intense pleasure of her company."
Marjorie was a very compelling person, and people enjoyed being around her (unless,
of course, she happened to be profiling them). To a great extent, that aspect
of her personality came through in her writing, too.
CC: I don’t understand the relationship between Marjorie and the woman in
the Randall Jarrell poem that gives the book its title. To me she seems as utterly
different from the Jarrell poem as anybody could be.
TN: Yes, she is quite different. In the book's introduction, I apologize for subverting
Jarrell's meaning. The woman in Jarrell's poem is defeated, dehumanized, de-sexed;
all color has been drained from her. Marjorie was nothing like that; her plumage
couldn't have been more vivid. It was, however, convenient for me to borrow the
notion of a woman at a zoo, observing the animals. In my construct, the woman
is Marjorie, and the animals are the various social types in Washington—"The
Pragmatist," "The Philanthropist," "The Hack," etc.,
which are all chapter titles in the book's first section. This has absolutely
nothing to do with Jarrell's use of these same elements.
My construct breaks down after the book's first section, but so does the awkwardness
of the book's relationship to the poem. In parts two and three, the book's title
gradually becomes more faithful to Jarrell's meaning. Jarrell's poem is, after
all, written in the oppressed woman's voice; it's a hair-raising cry of protest
against the loss of vitality and autonomy. As Marjorie delves deeper into her
own story, we hear a similar cry. We see Marjorie's anguish over her mother's
loss of vitality in "The Alchemist," and, in the book's final section,
we see Marjorie struggle to maintain her own vitality as her body is failing her.
The poem's final lines are, "You know what I was,/ You see what I am: change
me, change me!" In this she is both successful and not. As her illness progresses,
Marjorie maintains her clear-eyed perspective, and remains alive to life's possibilities.
At the same time, she reconciles herself to the inevitability of her death.
I'll grant you it's not a perfect fit, and there's a limit to my willingness to
see my wife's death in literary terms at all. In part, I'm just trying to follow
her own lead. Marjorie herself made use of the Jarrell poem in her tribute to
the late journalist Mary McGrory (which appears at the end of the book's second
section). Marjorie absolutely adored Jarrell. She was especially fond of his comic
novel, Pictures From An Institution.
CC: It would seem that Marjorie found a great subject in Washington and its characters.
Can you talk about Marjorie’s feelings about her city?
TN: She liked Washington quite a lot; much preferred it, for instance, to New
York, which she moved from in the mid-1980s. She liked its smaller scale. I guess
it felt to her like a half-step back toward Princeton, which is where she grew
up, though she never put it quite that way. I was paging through one of Marjorie's
childhood journals not long ago and, in a passage about visiting Washington in
early 1973 to protest the Vietnam war with her father, she wrote about how beautiful
she thought it was and said that she'd like to live here someday. I'm sure she'd
completely forgotten writing that by the time she actually did move here, but
maybe some of the underlying feeling lingered.
Marjorie explains her feelings toward Washington at the end of "Flying to
L.A.," a chapter in the book's second section. There was much in the place
that she found conventional and conservative, but she liked to write about the
contrast between Washington's constricted code of behavior and what she called
"the messy human stuff" that everyone pretended wasn't there.
CC: Will you tell us about how you selected the pieces that you included? I particularly
loved the profiles. Are there some that you left out?
TN: I left quite a bit out. In my first cut, I found that I had to limit Marjorie's
many superb profiles of powerful and ambitious white males—especially powerful
and ambitious white Republican males—because after you read two or three,
one after the other, they started to sound alike. The blame, I think, lies not
with Marjorie but with the white males themselves. The profiles included in Zoo
are very deliberately diverse, not out of some politically-correct impulse so
much as the need to emphasize variety within the Washington bestiary—perhaps
a bit more variety, in truth, than exists in the real Washington.
I also left out profiles of people who were not obvious Washington types. Michael
Lewis, about whom Marjorie wrote a riveting profile in Vanity Fair, didn't strike
me as properly classifiable as a Washington type even though he actually had lived
in Washington when the story was first published. Ditto, Larry King. Others, like
Anna Quindlan and Patricia Duff, weren't living in Washington when Marjorie profiled
them for Vanity Fair, so they didn't really fit.
Even with this template for exclusion, the original manuscript of Zoo was about
twice as long as the book that was finally published. I was particularly distressed
to cut Marjorie's Washington Post profile of Clark Clifford, which many people
remember as her best, from the book. It was just too long. The good news is that
the strong success of Zoo probably makes it inevitable that I will publish a follow-up
volume. When I do, Clifford will definitely be included.
CC: I also thought that many of the articles seemed fresh and relevant even after
as many as 15 years. Did you have that in mind as you chose the articles?
TN: To my mind, the pieces never stopped being fresh and relevant because they
read like short fiction. The key, for me, was to choose pieces not on the basis
of how important the profile subject was, but on the basis of how well Marjorie
conveyed that person's psychology, and what the person's story showed about the
sort of place Washington ever shall remain. Some people, I'll grant you, were
so boring that I couldn't even bring myself to reread Marjorie's profiles of them,
much less include their profiles in the book. Sam Skinner, who was chief of staff
to Bush 41, is an example. I figured that if I barely remembered that Marjorie
had profiled Skinner, then it couldn't have been one for the ages. Maybe 20 years
from now I'll take another look and discover I made a terrible mistake.
CC: I don’t know many of the people that are featured in Marjorie’s
journalism, but I know Vernon Jordan a little. Marjorie captures Vernon Jordon
brilliantly – I could not believe she did that piece 15 years ago. What
did he think of it?
TN: I don't think he much liked it, though I don't recall the details; I heard
about it third-hand. That one was a little awkward for me because at the time
Marjorie wrote it Jordan sat on the board of directors of Dow Jones, which owned
the Wall Street Journal, for which I worked (I don't work there anymore; now I
work for Slate, which is owned by the Washington Post Co.). Marjorie and I had
sat with Jordan and his wife at a Journal function not long before she wrote the
piece. Of course, that's one of the themes of Marjorie's profile—Jordan's
sheer ubiquity, which tends to silence anyone who wants to write about his troubling
transformation from civil rights leader to corporate fat cat.
Jordan is among the most charming people I've ever met. Marjorie was, among other
things, a great connoisseur of charm and its uses; she studied at the feet of
a master (her father), as she explains in the book. She puts this talent to great
use in the Jordan chapter.
CC: Marjorie clearly had a novelist’s eye for character. Nowhere is this
more evident than in her remarkable dissection of her parents. It’s an extraordinary
essay. Some of the lines are so memorable. About her mother: “You could
eat at her table every night and never taste the thing that you were really hungry
for.” Did she think about writing a novel?
TN: Yes. She started one, and left behind some fiction-writing exercises, but
she'd only made a few baby steps in that direction when she died. I have no doubt
that eventually Marjorie would have written some very good fiction. At the same
time, I think the quality of Marjorie's best writing demonstrates that the best
nonfiction makes as strong a literary claim as the best fiction. I think "The
Alchemist," which is the essay you refer to, is the best thing Marjorie ever
wrote. There's certainly more of Marjorie in it than there was in anything else
she put to paper.
CC: Finally, I had the feeling that most of the pieces in this book could only
have been written by a woman. They represent a woman’s eye and sensibility.
Of course, she also writes about “women’s issues,” but I just
felt the power of her women’s voice throughout. Do you feel that way?
TN: Yes. Jennifer Senior, in a wonderfully perceptive review in the New York Times
Book Review, made the same point, but with some trepidation, as though she worried
such a judgment might appear to diminish Marjorie's work. I don't think it diminishes
Marjorie at all to say that she was a very distinctively female writer. That was
a term of praise Marjorie herself often used to describe other people's work.
Of course she thought much of the stuff peddled as "chick lit" was hackwork.
But many of the women writers Marjorie most admired—Anne Tyler, say, or
Penelope Fitzgerald—she admired specifically for their skill at conveying
a woman's sensibility. Marjorie would be proud to be thought so herself. Which,
of course, doesn't mean her book is just for women. If it were, I promise you,
I'd have lost interest before completing its assembly. It's just a wonderful book.
I can say that, you know, because I didn't write it!
Excerpted from The Women at the Washington Zoo © Copyright 2010 by Marjorie Williams, Edited by Timothy Noah. Reprinted with permission by PublicAffairs . All rights reserved.
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