for Les Carlyon: 'Won't keep you, Les', by Andrew Rule - 2019

12 March 2019, Flemington, Melbourne,Australia

Above clip is whole service. Andrew Rule’s eulogy begins at 43.40.

Dear Les,

Won’t keep you, mate.

A lot of people here have heard you say that.

“Won’t keep you.”

An hour later, there you’d be, still yarning.

‘Won’t keep you, Les’

It’s the password to the Carlyon Club. It had a lot of members.

For a quiet man, you could talk on anything: history; newspapers; literature. And racing, of course. Not just gallopers but trotters and horses in general ... and working dogs and drenching sheep and tips on practical harness maintenance.

When Truman Capote died the best obituary on him wasn’t in The New York Times: it was yours. He was in your head with Larry McMurtry and Hemingway and Lawson and Tolstoy … and other great artists like Harry White and Roy Higgins and Ted Whitten and Manikato.

All equal opportunity subjects in Les World.

In 1980 I was a kid on The Age. Neil Mitchell was sports editor and heard me talking about horse breaking. Might as well have been talking Swahili for all Mitch knew -- but he knew “Les” would be interested. Everyone at The Age talked about you, even though you hadn’t been there for a few years by then.

So Mitch calls you, has the big chat, then gives me the handpiece. And that was that. The start of a 40-year conversation.

Remember how you read the manuscript of my first book in 1988? I took it to the house in Sevenoaks St. It wasn’t hard to spot:

The only house in Balwyn with a tractor in the carport.

(Won’t keep you, Les.)

It’s the hour before dawn as I write this.

Best hour of the day, you always said: “Never miss a sunrise, Andy. If you don’t stay up all night get up before dawn.”

God knows when you actually slept.

Dawn spoke to you. I reckon you sensed racing stables coming alive while the ordinary world slept. You called it Racing’s Closed Society. You loved it and no one described it better …

The thump of the bags of dirty straw and the tap of the farrier’s hammer. Strappers swearing at horses. The blue heeler straining at the chain, trying to eat the new apprentice kid.

You understood them, the horse people who shared your taste for the Jockey’s Breakfast -- a smoke and a good look round. There are plenty of them here today, Les.

There’s Patto over there: Led in forty-six Cup winners and broke in a couple of thousand horses. I asked him once why they rated you and he growled, ‘Because Les gets it right.’

Apart from everything else, you’re the poet laureate of the track.

You didn’t invent Bart Cummings -- he did that himself -- but you were first to catch his likeness, way back in 1974. The eyebrows curling up ‘like a creeper’ are now part of the language. Then there’s the story about Bart and the Pommy health inspector who told him the stable had “too many flies” -- and Bart straightaway asks ‘How many am I allowed to have?”

You made Bart a national figure, bigger than racing. Without you, Les, there’d be no bronze statue of him downstairs.

(Won’t keep you, Les.)

The way that restless mind of yours hummed after midnight. It wasn’t just the stables calling, was it? Your body clock was set in the last Golden Era of newspapers, the 1960s and 1970s. You’d come home still wired from the daily miracle of producing a paper, stay that way until dawn, I suspect. Even after you left that life, it never really left you, did it?

You once said you wondered how you would have gone in America, testing yourself among the best in the land that produced so many of our heroes: Twain and Mencken, Joe Palmer and Joe Liebling, Runyon and Red Smith. You didn’t go, but their words came to you. You absorbed them. We all learn by imitation and repetition but you added other things -- intelligence, that prodigious memory -- and imagination

Under the homespun, hard-bitten exterior you were the most sensitive of men, with an intellect to match that soaring imagination. You showed it again and again, but never more than in the opening chapters of Gallipoli. It was mesmerising. The night I started reading it, I couldn’t stop. And I dreamed about the charge at the Nek.

The year Gallipoli came out, we got a plumber to our place. Seventeen stone of tattoos in a blue singlet. A van full of tools -- and sitting on the dash, next to a meat pie and an empty stubby, was a copy of Gallipoli. Norm the plumber just had to have it to read at lunch time. When I told you, you were delighted -- but not surprised. Your readers were real people, everyday people, you said. “You’ll never sell many books if your readers are only the people who read broadsheet reviews,” you told me.

(Won’t keep you, Les.)

Some of us got to see you lay out a page, write a killer headline and caption and rewrite copy, turning lead into gold. You could do nearly anything in a newspaper except run the presses. The truth is, you were always one thing: a perfectionist about anything that interested you.

I once went up to your study/ library. It was also a smokehouse, you had maybe 1000 books in there and every one was pickled in tobacco smoke. You reached into your storeroom, (where you kept a perfect WW1 officer’s military saddle, as you do) and grabbed a bridle you’d made, stitched to fit just one horse. No buckles. Made to fit like a glove. Perfect.

That was you, Les. You made things perfect. But words were always top of the list.

I saw you get one letter out of place in 40 years. I make more mistakes every day.

As Chopper Read said, ‘Even Beethoven had his critics.’

But you don’t have many. You collected friends and admirers the way a lamp attracts moths.

As Neil says, some of your ‘boys’ were girls -- like Jen Byrne and Corrie Perkin and Virginia Trioli and Jill Baker.

Last week when the sad news broke, a group of your female admirers gathered for a drink and swapped Les stories. One leaned over to Jen Byrne and said, ‘Les wrote like an angel -- but there was always one horse too many’.

Don’t worry, mate. That one’s from Sydney and she wouldn’t know. AS IF you could ever have one horse too many.

Les, you’re a father, grandfather, prose stylist, critic, historian, mentor and mate.

A teacher who never stopped learning.

You turned knowledge into wisdom. Best of all, you were kind as well as clever. A rare quinella in the biggest race of all, the human race.

Pushing words around the page, you said writing was.

You pushed millions of words for nearly 60 years. Every one ground down to a perfect finish. It was the only thing that really mattered, apart from your family.

But you knew that what mattered more than the words left on the page were the ones you left out. Your tribute to Denise in your last book says it all: “I owe her more than words can say.” There it is: a lifetime of love and gratitude in eight words.

Les, we’re all we’re all going to miss you more than words can say.

**************

Andrew Rule also wrote a newspaper obituary for his great friend which appeared in the Herald Sun and is reproduced with permission below.

Les Carlyon, giant of Australian journalism, liked to quote Red Smith, giant of American sports journalism.

“Dying is no big deal,” Smith once told mourners at a friend’s funeral. “The least of us will manage that. Living is the trick.”

Carlyon fetched that line from his prodigious memory in honour of his contemporary Peter McFarline, sports writer and once Washington correspondent for this company.

But the sentiment — about living with purpose, rather than making a grand exit — fits Carlyon himself.

Right up to the final weeks of the illness that ended his life this week Les worked at the craft that made his name. His soaring intellect was anchored by homespun principles.

He was always on the reader’s side. He never joined the authors “club” nor any other, really, except the Australian War Memorial board he was invited to join because of his remarkable military histories, Gallipoli and The Great War. He was welcome at any club in the land, especially of the horse racing variety, but would usually be writing or with his wife Denise and their children and grandchildren.

Les had his weaknesses — cigarettes and black coffee, reading and racing — but never succumbed to the temptation to take himself seriously. But he did take his work seriously. It showed, in sentence after flawless sentence of crisp prose he kept up for nearly 60 years and millions of words.

Les Carlyon was born in that increasingly foreign country – 1940s rural Victoria – and never forgot it. Part of him was always the kid from up Elmore way but some talents need a broader canvas. Like his fellow artist, the late champion jockey Roy Higgins, young Carlyon quit the country to further his career: in his case to work at this newspaper’s forerunner, The Sun News-Pictorial, in 1960.

The Sun was as unpretentious as it was popular. It relied on appealing to ordinary readers. Carlyon the cub reporter quickly learned to make words short and sharp.

By age 21, fitting part-time study around full-time work, the rising star had been lured “across town” to write for the opposition newspaper, where he would cap a rapid rise to become editor at 33 before suffering a bout of the recurring pneumonia that has finally ended his life. He would later return as editor-in-chief at the Herald & Weekly Times but was best known for his precision at the solitary business of writing.

“Hero” and “champion” are so overused as to debase the currency. Carlyon was one of few entitled to be described that way by the many who admired him.

To want to meet a writer because you like their work, a writer once noted, is like wanting to meet the goose because you like pate. It can be a disappointment to meet heroes, but meeting Les was no let down. For a modest man, he was a good talker about shearers or Shakespeare and from Tony Soprano to Tolstoy.

He wasn’t one for pomp and privilege, had a faintly puritanical distrust of the trappings of wealth and power unless maybe it involved an unraced two-year-old. Yet he was on first-name terms with the wealthy and powerful.

When Les was “gonged” with the top award in the Honours list in 2014, it was a great thing and not befoe time. But Leslie Allen Carlyon AC was still “Les” to his friends.

He delighted in the story of the English publishers who decided (wisely) to publish his best-selling Gallipoli, but rejected his lifetime byline by printing “L.A. Carlyon” on the cover.

It seemed to the Londoners no serious author’s name could possibly be contracted to “Les” on a hardback in England. That made Les laugh. All that mattered to him is that readers liked the book.

For him, getting the story right was everything. He did it for decades and helped others do the same.

He was not only talented and tenacious but patient and kind with it. Who knows how many people he called — and how many called him — for “a yarn” late at night.

He shared knowledge without lecturing or hectoring, ego or spite. Few touched by genius are as generous. He treated his extended family of writers, reporters, publishers and broadcasters almost as well as he did his favourites — horses and horse people.

Jennifer Byrne would become a national media identity – in print then television – but nursed lessons learned as a teenage reporter from her first news editor.

Byrne recalls a “lean stripe of a man built like one of the racehorses he loved who took a bunch of know-nothing cadets and showed us how to become journalists.

“He showed by doing, by being the best writer on the paper. He wrote like an angel and produced stories which were also lessons. He was scrupulous about facts, generous in spirit, his stories full of unlikely winners and gallant losers; you could call them Runyonesque except for their depth and elegance.

“As time passed, we became friends, and I saw how much work went into what read so easily. He gave us chances we muffed, and helped us do better. He praised lightly but when it came, it was like a sunburst. To Sir with Love? Well, yes, but I am eternally grateful for the advice he gave and example he set, as are so many others. Les was the best of our business, and unforgettable.”

That testimonial speaks for the many people Les helped. They know who they are; they could staff their own newspaper, radio station or publishing house.

Carlyon influenced his followers deftly, the way the best teachers can. As for his own influences, there were the Americans like Red Smith and Twain and Runyon and Joe Palmer, but there was also Henry Lawson and Tolstoy and more.

He wrote about any subject with flair – but about racing with something like love. His collection of racing stories, True Grit, has barely been out of print in 25 years. No one does it better.

He went to Tasmania after the Port Arthur massacre and wrote what he saw at the scene. He wrote a timeless account of Princess Diana’s funeral. He went to Hiroshima to record the 50thanniversary of the atom bomb. He wrote about heroes from Bradman to Ali to Clive James and about those grand stayers Kingston Town, Tommy Smith and especially Bart Cummings. He wrote about business and politics, sport and war. He never wrote about himself.

Carlyon grew up in the shadows of the Depression and war, before the fashion for self-promotion took hold. He wrote countless words across decades but the “perpendicular pronoun” is as rare in his work as a spelling mistake or a clumsy phrase.

Carlyon did not invent Bart Cummings but was first to capture the likeness that helped turn a horse trainer into a national treasure.

He wrote of Cummings: “He was pragmatic and mystical, likeable and unknowable. Racing might be about desperates. Cummings was too casual to be desperate. He wasn’t like anyone else: he was simply Bart.”

The theme is that by being his own man, ignoring fame and fashion, Cummings accidentally found both, to become a figure comparable only with Bradman – in stand-alone success and bulletproof self-belief.

Les Carlyon spoke all over the world in the last 25 years but never more movingly than at the memorial service for Roy Higgins in 2014.

Everyone liked Roy, he said, “because he was so easy to like. He was the benign presence, he was humble, he was generous, he was courteous, he didn’t carry grudges, he didn’t look back, he wasn’t sour or cynical. He had time for everyone, be they the prime minister or a down-at-heel punter cadging for a tip.

“He was a great human being and that might be the biggest story, because it’s harder to be a great human being.”

All words that fit the man who wrote them.

for James Baldwin: 'Jimmy. You crowned us', by Toni Morrison - 1988

20 December 1987, published New York Times, USA

Jimmy, there is too much to think about you, and too much to feel. The difficulty is your life refuses summation - it always did - and invites contemplation instead. Like many of us left here I thought I knew you. Now I discover that in your company it is myself I know. That is the astonishing gift of your art and your friendship: You gave us ourselves to think about, to cherish. We are like Hall Montana* watching ''with new wonder'' his brother saints, knowing the song he sang is us, ''He is us.''

I never heard a single command from you, yet the demands you made on me, the challenges you issued to me, were nevertheless unmistakable, even if unenforced: that I work and think at the top of my form, that I stand on moral ground but know that ground must be shored up by mercy, that ''the world is before [ me ] and [ I ] need not take it or leave it as it was when [ I ] came in.''

Well, the season was always Christmas with you there and, like one aspect of that scenario, you did not neglect to bring at least three gifts. You gave me a language to dwell in, a gift so perfect it seems my own invention. I have been thinking your spoken and written thoughts for so long I believed they were mine. I have been seeing the world through your eyes for so long, I believed that clear clear view was my own. Even now, even here, I need you to tell me what I am feeling and how to articulate it. So I have pored again through the 6,895 pages of your published work to acknowledge the debt and thank you for the credit. No one possessed or inhabited language for me the way you did. You made American English honest - genuinely international. You exposed its secrets and reshaped it until it was truly modern dialogic, representative, humane. You stripped it of ease and false comfort and fake innocence and evasion and hypocrisy. And in place of deviousness was clarity. In place of soft plump lies was a lean, targeted power. In place of intellectual disingenuousness and what you called ''exasperating egocentricity,'' you gave us undecorated truth. You replaced lumbering platitudes with an upright elegance. You went into that forbidden territory and decolonized it, ''robbed it of the jewel of its naivete,'' and un-gated it for black people so that in your wake we could enter it, occupy it, restructure it in order to accommodate our complicated passion - not our vanities but our intricate, difficult, demanding beauty, our tragic, insistent knowledge, our lived reality, our sleek classical imagination - all the while refusing ''to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize [ us ] .'' In your hands language was handsome again. In your hands we saw how it was meant to be: neither bloodless nor bloody, and yet alive.

It infuriated some people. Those who saw the paucity of their own imagination in the two-way mirror you held up to them attacked the mirror, tried to reduce it to fragments which they could then rank and grade, tried to dismiss the shards where your image and theirs remained - locked but ready to soar. You are an artist after all and an artist is forbidden a career in this place; an artist is permitted only a commercial hit. But for thousands and thousands of those who embraced your text and who gave themselves permission to hear your language, by that very gesture they ennobled themselves, became unshrouded, civilized.

The second gift was your courage, which you let us share: the courage of one who could go as a stranger in the village and transform the distances between people into intimacy with the whole world; courage to understand that experience in ways that made it a personal revelation for each of us. It was you who gave us the courage to appropriate an alien, hostile, all-white geography because you had discovered that ''this world [ meaning history ] is white no longer and it will never be white again.'' Yours was the courage to live life in and from its belly as well as beyond its edges, to see and say what it was, to recognize and identify evil but never fear or stand in awe of it. It is a courage that came from a ruthless intelligence married to a pity so profound it could convince anyone who cared to know that those who despised us ''need the moral authority of their former slaves, who are the only people in the world who know anything about them and who may be, indeed, the only people in the world who really care anything about them.'' When that unassailable combination of mind and heart, of intellect and passion was on display it guided us through treacherous landscape as it did when you wrote these words - words every rebel, every dissident, revolutionary, every practicing artist from Capetown to Poland from Waycross to Dublin memorized: ''A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of the people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.''

The third gift was hard to fathom and even harder to accept. It was your tenderness - a tenderness so delicate I thought it could not last, but last it did and envelop me it did. In the midst of anger it tapped me lightly like the child in Tish's** womb: ''Something almost as hard to catch as a whisper in a crowded place, as light and as definite as a spider's web, strikes below my ribs, stunning and astonishing my heart . . . the baby, turning for the first time in its incredible veil of water, announces its presence and claims me; tells me, in that instant, that what can get worse can get better . . . in the meantime - forever - it is entirely up to me.'' Yours was a tenderness, of vulnerability, that asked everything, expected everything and, like the world's own Merlin, provided us with the ways and means to deliver. I suppose that is why I was always a bit better behaved around you, smarter, more capable, wanting to be worth the love you lavished, and wanting to be steady enough to witness the pain you had witnessed and were tough enough to bear while it broke your heart, wanting to be generous enough to join your smile with one of my own, and reckless enough to jump on in that laugh you laughed. Because our joy and our laughter were not only all right, they were necessary.

You knew, didn't you, how I needed your language and the mind that formed it? How I relied on your fierce courage to tame wildernesses for me? How strengthened I was by the certainty that came from knowing you would never hurt me? You knew, didn't you, how I loved your love? You knew. This then is no calamity. No. This is jubilee. ''Our crown,'' you said, ''has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do,'' you said, ''is wear it.''

And we do, Jimmy. You crowned us.

* A character in ''Just Above My Head'';

** a character in ''If Beale Street Could Talk''; two novels by James Baldwin.

For Leonard Bernstein: 'Lenny lived four lives in one', by Ned Rorem - 1990

18 October 1990, New York City, USA

Ned Rorem is a composer, writer, diarist and friend of Bernstein, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 is now 96. This obituary appeared in his collected pieces Other Entertainment. There is no available audio or vision of this speech.

During the terrible hours following Lenny’s death last Sunday the phone rang incessantly. Friend after friend called to commiserate, and also the press, with a flood of irrelevant questions: How well did you know him? What made him so American? Did he smoke himself to death? Wasn’t he too young to die? What was he really like? None of this seemed to matter since the world had suddenly grown empty – the most crucial musician of our time had vanished. But next morning it seemed clear that there are no irrelevant questions, and these were as good as any to set off a brief remembrance.

How well did I know him? To “know well” has to do with intensity more than with habit. Everyone in Lenny’s vast entourage felt themselves to be, at one time or another, the sole love of his life, and I was no exception. The fact that he not only championed my music, but conducted it in a manner coinciding with my very heartbeat, was naturally not unrelated to love. Years could pass without our meeting, then for weeks we’d be inseparable. During these periods he would play as hard as he worked, with a power of concentration as acute for orgies as for oratorios. In Milan, in 1954, when he was preparing La Sonnambula for La Scala, I asked him how Callas was to deal with. “Well, she knows what she wants and gets it, but since she’s always right, this wastes no time. She’s never temperamental or unkind during rehearsal – she saves that for parties.” Lenny was the same: socially exasperating, even cruel with his manipulative narcissism (but only with peers, not with unprotected underlings), generous to a fault with his professional sanctioning of what he believed in.

Was he indeed so American? He was the sum of his contradictions. His most significant identity was that of jack-of-all-trades (which the French aptly call l’homme orchestre), surely a European trait; while Americans have always been specialists. … Yes, he was frustrated at forever being “accused” of spreading himself thin, but this very spreading, like the frustration itself, defined his theatrical nature. Had he concentrated on but one of his gifts, that gift would have shriveled.

…

Was he too young to die? What is too young? Lenny led four lives in one, so he was not 72 years old but 288. Was he, as so many have meanly claimed, paying for the rough life he led? As he lived many lives, so he died many deaths. Smoking may have been one cause, but so was overwork, and especially sorrow at a world he so longed to change but which remained as philistine and foolish as before. Which may ultimately be the brokenhearted reason any artist dies. Or any person.

So what was he really like? Lenny was like everyone else, only more so. But nobody else was like him.

for Fiona Richardson: 'Tanja, she’s mad! Way too intense…..You’re too nice to work for her…', by Tanja Kovac - 2017

28 August 2017, Melbourne, Australia

Fiona Richardson MP was a Victorian ALP Minister for Women and the Prevention of Family Violence. She died relatively suddenly from cancer in August 2017. Tanja Kovac was her Chief of Staff. Tanja is National Co-Convenor of EMILY's List Australia, a financial, political and personal support network for progressive Labor women in Parliament.

I didn’t know Fiona Richardson MP before I went to work for her.

A respected and at times feared factional warrior from the Victorian Right, Fiona’s reputation as a fierce political operative preceded her. I understood the kind of tenacity and toughness it took to mix it with the faceless men of the ALP. Fiona had not only survived in that culture she had thrived. She’d even married into it, forming a formidable partnership with former Victorian ALP State Secretary Stephen Newnham.

A couple of days before taking a job as her Senior Advisor in the new Andrews Government, I bumped into Labor mates at the soccer who were shocked when I said I was going into her Ministerial Office.

“Tanja, she’s mad! Way too intense…..You’re too nice to work for her…”

At the same time I would later find out that Fiona was being told similar things. About me. "You can't employ her. She's a feminazi. She's in the Left!"

The more people warned us away; the more we gravitated to each other. Bad-ass bitches, she loved freaking people out whenever we strode together - Left/Right - on a mission.

She brought me in for gender and legal expertise to help manage her Women and Family Violence Prevention portfolios. I stayed and became her Chief because we found in each other a kindred spirit.

It’s one thing to be a Women’s Minister; yet another to invest in women while doing it. Fiona built an all woman Ministerial Office - a coven of witches - all deeply loyal to her. A passionate, pro-choice feminist, unafraid to speak her mind, I focussed on supporting her to be the best leader she could be.

It was a dream job. I wished I’d kept the note she wrote to me on my first day. "We’ll do this as a team”. And so we did. I regret that it took so long for us to find each other. I needed Fiona in my life earlier – a powerhouse political mentor and ally.

My greatest achievement as her Chief of Staff was to get her to finally accept my hugs and spontaneous praise whenever she gave an awesome speech or did something else amazing (which was often). She was a prickly pear, no doubt a physical manifestation of the family violence she had experienced as a child. I wore her down until she hugged me back. It's how I know the love was mutual.

We travelled to New Zealand and New York together to check out innovative family violence services while we waited for the Royal Commission into Family Violence to hand down its findings. We saw many things that inspired us on those trips. But we also had time to get to know each other. It felt very comfortable roaming the streets of a foreign place, talking about our families, kids and politics.

I discovered her eccentricities. The preference for barefeet, the secret love for all things spiritual. She didn't smoke. She didn't drink. She didn't eat meat. She'd fought breast cancer.

She was complex.

An intuitive, intellectual, innovative, ideas person.
A fearless, fearsome, fragile, factional warrior.
A loyal, loving, larrikin, Labor lady.

She was Boadaceia Fi!

Tennyson described the ancient woman warrior “Standing loftily charioted, Mad and Maddening all that heard her in her fierce volubility”.

This is how I think of her: The get-away-with-anything-blonde, with steely blue eyes and patrician tallness. So politically sharp it was dangerous to be around you. A true leader.

She loved ideas. Hers came partly from political nous, but also intuition. It was a wholly powerful combination.

Fiona worked with Rosie Batty on anti-family violence initiatives. (Image supplied.)

It's no accident that she provided the intellectual policy genius in two key areas of Andrews Government Reform - the removal of dangerous Level Crossings and, of course, Family Violence Reform.

She achieved so much in a short space of time.

Overseeing the Royal Commission into Family Violence, getting Respectful Relationships into the State Curriculum, family violence leave for our public sector workers, funding Victoria against Violence and turning the state orange and developing the state’s first Gender Equality Strategy – which the whole nation is now emulating! Her decision to talk about her own family's experience of violence on Australian Story took guts. She touched the lives of so many people. The whole country got to understand why she was such a fearless champion for victim-survivors.

No-one was more destined to be the nation’s first Family Violence Prevention Minister.

What she did for Rosie Batty. Quietly. No fanfare. She’s so grateful. Fiona had unfinished business.

Before she died she was working to create a Family Violence Prevention Agency to change attitudes and behaviours towards violence in the home within a generation. She planned dedicated and long term funding for prevention, protected by legislation. It would be a world first. Now Fiona's Law, as I will think of it, rests with good women and men across Victorian Parliament, to fulfil her legacy.

For those wishing to financially support Fiona's legacy, make donations to Safe Steps Family Violence Response Centre safesteps.org.au or the Luke Batty Foundation lukebattyfoundation.org.au.

for Michelle McNamara: 'She hasn’t left a void. She’s left a blast crater', by Patton Oswalt - 2016

published 3 May 2016, Time magazine, California, USA

Michelle McNamara was a true crime author and blogger, and her husband Patton Oswalt is comedian and movie actor. published Time website. There is no available video or audio of this eulogy.

Michelle Eileen McNamara entered the world on April 14, 1970.

On April 14, 2016 she turned 46.

One week later she was gone.

That’s the kind of opening Michelle would have written. She’d have done it better. Added one perfect adjective or geographical shading to pull you in. The pulling in of you, the reader, was never aggressive, calculating or desperate. She didn’t have to raise her voice.

She was a true crime writer—first on her blog, TrueCrimeDiary.com. More than 150 precise, haunting entries about subjects like “The Man With the Hammer,” “Devil in Michigan,” “The Ice Maiden and the Genius,” “Syko Sam” and “The Desert Bunker Murders.” There were also thoughtful, provocative ruminations on abiding crime topics—“The Big Fake Called The Fugue State,” “Crowdsleuthing” and “DNA (hooray).” There was also a fascinating entry called “#bloodbath,” a speculative masterpiece about how the Manson murders might have been different—or not happened at all—if our current social media infrastructure had existed in 1969.

This drew the attention of Los Angeles Magazine, who hired Michelle to write an article about “The Golden State Killer” (a name she coined)—the worst unsolved string of homicides in California history.

The article drew the attention of Harper Collins, who hired her to write a massive book about The Golden State Killer. This was the project she was 2½ years into when her story stopped, sometime on the morning of April 21.

Those are facts but not her entire story. Her life also involved social work in Belfast and Oakland, and screenwriting in Los Angeles, and teaching creative writing at Minnesota State, and motherhood and marriage and glorious, lost years on the outskirts of the early 90s Chicago music scene, where she also worked for a young Michelle Obama. One day Michelle Obama’s husband came into the office to speak to the staff. He was impressive and funny. Another encounter, another memory in a life spent fascinated with people and relationships and the unknown.

The reaction to her passing, the people who are shocked at her senseless absence, is a testament to how she steered her life with joyous, wicked curiosity. Cops and comedians call—speechless or sending curt regards. Her family is devastated but can’t help remember all of the times she made them laugh or comforted them, and they smile and laugh themselves. She hasn’t left a void. She’s left a blast crater.

I loved her. This is the first time I’ve been able to use “I” writing this. Probably because there hasn’t been much of an “I” since the morning of April 21. There probably won’t be for a while. Whatever there is belongs to my daughter—to our daughter. Alice.

Five days after Michelle was gone, Alice and I were half-awake at dawn, after a night of half-sleeping. Alice sat up in bed. Her face was silhouetted in the dawn light of the bedroom windows. I couldn’t see her expression. I just heard her voice: “When your mom dies you’re the best memory of her. Everything you do and say is a memory of her.”

That’s the kind of person Michelle created and helped shape.

That was Michelle. That is Michelle.

I love her.

Norman Mailer: 'Norman Mailer passed away yesterday after celebrating his fifteenth divorce and sixteenth wedding', (self penned) by Norman Mailer - 1979

1979, published as a joke in Boston Magazine. Mailer died 10 November 2007

Novelist Shelved, By Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer passed away yesterday after celebrating his fifteenth divorce and sixteenth wedding. “I just don’t feel the old vim,” complained the writer recently. He was renowned in publishing circles for his blend of fictional journalism and factual fiction, termed by literary critic William Buckley: Contemporaneous Ratiocinative Aesthetical Prolegomena. Buckley was consequentially sued by Mailer for malicious construction of invidious acronyms. “Norman does take himself seriously,” was Mr. Buckley’s reply. “Of course he is the last of those who do.”

At the author’s bedside were eleven of his fifteen ex-wives, twenty-two of his twenty-four children, and five of his seven grandchildren, of whom four are older than six of their uncles and aunts.

At present, interest revolves around the estate. Executors have warned that Mailer, although earning an average income of one and a half million dollars a year, has had to meet an annual overhead of two million, three hundred thousand, of which two million, two hundred and fifty thousand went in child support, alimony, and back IRS payments. It is estimated that his liabilities outweigh his assets by eight million, six hundred thousand.

When asked, on occasion why he married so often, the former Pulitzer Prize winner replied, “To get divorced. You don’t know anything about a woman until you meet her in court.”

At the memorial service, passages from his favorite literary works, all penned by himself, were read, as well as passages from prominent Americans.

His old friend, Truman Capote, said, “He was always so butch. I thought he’d outlive us all.”

Gore Vidal, his famous TV and cocktail-party adversary, complained sadly, “Norman did lack the wit that copes. I would add that he had the taste of Snopes, but why advertise William Faulkner, who’s responsible for everything godawful in American penmanship—one can’t call it letters.”

Andy Warhol said, “I always thought Norman kept a low profile. That’s what I liked about him so much.”

Gloria Steinem stated: “A pity. He was getting ready to see the light.”

Jimmy Carter, serving his fifth consecutive term as president, replied in answer to a question at his press conference this morning, “It is my wife’s and I regret that we never did get to invite Norman Miller [sic] to the White House, but we will mourn his passing. He did his best to improve the state of American book-writing and reading, which we all need and applaud.”