The last time I visited Rebecca in the hospital, in September, 2022, we spent the afternoon researching hospice options and talking about her novel. Rebecca had been working on it for a decade, and for the past four years she’d been sick: lung cancer that spread to her bones, and then her brain. If I was being honest with myself, and I probably wasn’t, there was a kind of magical thinking embedded in the pleasure of hearing Rebecca talk about her book, which was about the life and times of Peggy Guggenheim, the legendary heiress and art collector. Surely someone this enmeshed in an ambitious project couldn’t die in the midst of realizing it. It seemed like the effort itself would keep her alive.
During that last hospital visit—in her room on the eighteenth floor, overlooking the dirty glory of the East River—Rebecca told me about the unwritten final section of her book: an account of Peggy’s short but passionate affair with Samuel Beckett, in 1938, just as she was launching her first gallery. Rebecca imagined the love affair and the gallery opening as twin strokes of joy and victory for Peggy after an early life shadowed by tragedy: her father’s death on the Titanic; her first marriage, to an angry, often violent artist; her beloved elder sister’s death in childbirth. Rebecca understood the affair as a flare of vivid flourishing: great sex, long talks, days spent wandering the streets of Paris and drinking champagne in bed. She got a sly, affectionate expression on her face whenever she spoke about Peggy. Did I know that she had slept with Marcel Duchamp and John Cage? That she’d eaten meals cooked by Constantin Brancusi in his smelting furnace? Rebecca loved gossip. She knew that it was where the truth lived.
When Rebecca received her initial diagnosis, in 2018, she was given only six months to live. Now, after four years of outliving her prognosis, she’d received terrible news about her liver, and it was clear she didn’t have much longer. She handed me a little notebook and asked me to take notes: The name of a Kingston hospice. What she wanted the end of her novel to feel like. I copied down her words: Give her this third section, some bliss and triumph.
Rebecca had been drifting in and out of lucidity, but when I read her the first few pages of Shirley Hazzard’s novel “The Transit of Venus” the prose snapped her into sharp attentiveness. “How does she do that?” she whispered, and I had to admit that I often wondered the same about Rebecca. Not just her writing but her continual fight to steal another few months of life; her ability to keep giving herself fully to this novel, not despite her sickness but driven by it; her utter absorption in the world of her thirteen-year-old daughter, Ada, and curiosity about the person Ada was becoming. She told me that she wanted to spend her last six months in hospice doing only two things: lying in bed with Ada and finishing her book.
But she didn’t have six months. She died a few weeks later, on October 3rd, at the age of fifty-four, the book unfinished. A few months after that, her husband, Herb, and her agent, Christy, each came to me with a question: Would I consider finishing it?
I knew at once that I would say yes—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. Rebecca had been clear that if she died before the novel was done she did not want it published as an incomplete manuscript. This didn’t surprise me, but other questions remained: How should the novel be brought to completion? How much of it, exactly, had she left behind?
When I received the files from Christy, I saw that the bulk of the manuscript was already there—something like two hundred and fifty pages. Then, there was a document from Herb, full of material that Rebecca had dictated to him from her hospital bed in the final months. Herb also created a Google Drive with notes and stray scenes she’d left behind. And then there was a whole corpus of things she’d told friends about her intentions, scattered clues as to how the pieces of the puzzle might fit together.
The novel—titled, simply, “Peggy”—spanned the first half of Guggenheim’s life and was divided into three parts. The first section narrated her childhood in New York—born in 1898, she was an heir to tremendous fortunes on both sides of her family—and her growing disillusionment with her world of débutante balls and upper-class pageantry. The second section centered on Peggy’s bohemian years in Paris, where she moved in 1921, marrying a tempestuous and charismatic artist named Laurence Vail. They had two children, Sindbad and Pegeen, and moved to a rambling villa on the French Riviera, where their marriage dramatically unravelled. (Vail could be almost extravagantly violent; sometimes, Peggy claimed, he even smeared jam in her hair.)
In the largely unwritten third section, we would see Peggy finally coming into her own: falling in love with Beckett, amassing works by Europe’s greatest Surrealist and abstract artists, and opening her gallery Guggenheim Jeune, in London. Peggy had often been misunderstood and disrespected, seen as a slutty dilettante who threw her money around. But Rebecca took Peggy seriously, as a woman full of wit, savvy, and passion, hungry for experience and purpose and with an eye for art, and for people, that others couldn’t yet appreciate.
When I spoke to Rebecca’s editor about the task I was accepting, I stressed that my role must be to excavate Rebecca’s intentions and see them through, adding as little of myself as possible. “I’d like to preserve as much of Rebecca’s DNA as I can,” I said, not quite hearing the impossible hope embedded in my metaphor: that completing her novel might somehow bring her back.
I hadn’t known Rebecca before her illness. When we became friends, in 2019, she was already living on time she hadn’t known she would have. We were both teaching in Columbia’s M.F.A. program, and a student put us in touch, certain we would get along. Our early friendship unfolded as a series of long, breathless conversations—about our writing, our marriages, our daughters. These mostly happened when she was in the city for chemo or radiation treatments; or we’d see each other upstate, where she and Herb and Ada lived, chatting for hours on a pair of Adirondack chairs perched on her lawn, as twilight darkened the big purple sky. We talked about idealizing other women who seemed more successful or somehow more “together” than we were, and about the unnerving relief of hearing that their lives were falling apart, too. (I was getting divorced and found company in others’ ruptures.)
We weren’t exactly young, but we made friends the way younger women might—each inside very different kinds of crisis, a bit more raw and exposed. With Rebecca, it felt possible to leave behind the brittle exoskeleton of pretense—the things I felt I was supposed to say about mothering, or being married, or no longer being married—and instead to say what I actually felt, the mess and grime of it.
In the way of two writers courting, we began to read each other. Rebecca had published two books: “The Torn Skirt” (2001), a novel about a high-school dropout in Victoria, British Columbia (Rebecca’s home town), who starts hanging out in a world of drifters, junkies, and sex workers; and “Under the Bridge” (2005), a nonfiction account of the murder of Reena Virk, a fourteen-year-old from Vancouver Island who in 1997 was attacked by a group of teen-agers. Over e-mail, we embarked on a back-and-forth interview for The Paris Review about “Under the Bridge,” which was being rereleased. Rebecca told me how, after reading about the case, she flew back to Canada and started asking questions. “I kept learning things that weren’t in the newspapers,” she said. She interviewed the perpetrators and attended their trials. I admired how she’d brought the granular gaze of a novelist to material that could so easily be sensationalized, searching not for morals but for contradiction and mystery.
“Female rage is usually turned inward,” she said. “I didn’t want to romanticize the violence of these girls, but at the same time it seemed interesting to explore how and why these girls were a threat.” It occurred to me that Rebecca herself had more threat and edge in her than I did. I was a people-pleasing creature of appeasement and nuance, whereas she was bolder and spoke in triangles with acute angles. I wanted to learn from her the art of being sharp.
Rebecca sometimes stayed with me in the city after treatments, sleeping in my bed while I slept in my daughter’s room. After I got my daughter down, we’d sit on my red couch and she’d talk about watching Ada grow up, about the feeling of drowning in her Peggy research, how there wasn’t possibly space for all of it, not in any novel. She tended to steer our conversations away from her cancer, and I sensed a stubborn refusal to make her illness the most important part of her life. Still, there were constant reminders of how sick she was. She took sips of miso soup, the only thing she could stomach, but by the end of the night she’d barely eaten any. Or I would catch a glimpse of a small white box attached to her arm: a machine that would inject a drug to boost her white blood cells the day after her chemo. One morning after she left, I found it on the floor beneath my coffee table—eerie and orphaned, its work done.
Rebecca craved beauty like oxygen or water, a vital element. The first time I visited her in that final hospital room, I brought her a lacquered tray from the Morgan Library, because I wanted her to have something beautiful with her. But when I got there I almost laughed—her room, of course, was already full of beautiful things from visiting friends: a periwinkle cashmere cardigan, a plaid woollen blanket, expensive French hand cream.
I’d also brought her a card with a drawing of a crab, which I hadn’t connected to the zodiac until I saw the word “cancer” in big red letters on the back. In the lobby, waiting for my visitor’s pass, I hastily scribbled one more word, so that it read “Fuck Cancer.” Better. When Rebecca saw it, she laughed her gravelly, sexy laugh. She was often entertaining friends in that hospital room, and it always brought her great pleasure to introduce them to one another: This is Zoma, she’s an incredible writer. She brought me these fantastic macarons from a little bakery on the Lower East Side. The last time I saw her, she gave me a silver ring with a small black stone. She’d given matching ones to a few friends, as if creating a coven that might outlast her.
Opening Rebecca’s files was thrilling and unnerving. It felt like talking to her again. The pages were sprinkled with notes she had made to herself: she needed to decide how to end a chapter; there was some missing detail or observation. Many of the notes felt like clues in a scavenger hunt she’d left from beyond the grave: Find a typing exercise from 1920. Find a detail from a 1927 bourgeois living room. What would Peggy want to see at the Musée d’Orsay after a terrible fight with her husband? Often I would hear these assignments in Rebecca’s voice: More description of a Dante-esque forest. Many of the tasks were straightforward—a scalloped lamp and a silver sunburst mirror for the living room—but some required more attention. The Orsay did not become a museum until 1986, for example; if Peggy was going to look at Impressionist paintings after a terrible fight with her husband, she would have to go somewhere else.
Reading through the manuscript, I often found myself writing notes in the first-person plural: “Here is where we need to figure out where Part One ends . . .” “Here is where we need to add a few beats about her lover looking like Jesus Christ . . .” In free indirect discourse, a third-person narrator lapses into the voice of a character—and that’s what I wanted, to submit myself to Rebecca’s voice. Of course, the “we” was aspirational. I wanted to understand this as a collaboration that Rebecca and I were undertaking.
Of all the questions embedded in the manuscript, the most pressing was the simplest: How should the novel end? Should it go all the way up to the beginning of the war? Should it close with Peggy and Beckett in bed? Or with Peggy finally fleeing Paris for America, in 1941, booking passage on a Lisbon flight with an unruly passel of past and future lovers?
In the document of ideas and intentions that Rebecca had dictated to Herb, I was struck by the dates of the entries, how close they were to the end. “Rebecca had lost the ability to type and to use her phone and was in and out of coherence,” Herb told me. “But when, after several tries, she would decide to get to work, her speech would roll out in fully formed paragraphs with very little hesitation.” The last entry was dated October 3rd, the day of Rebecca’s death, and it consisted of just four words: “Oh oh oh stone.” It was uncanny and unexpected: a perfect lyric fragment. But what did it mean?
The Rebecca drafts I was given were PDFs, which meant that I would need to convert them into Word files before I could start writing. This wasn’t a technologically demanding task, but I devised countless ways to delay it. I found more biographies to read, and then Peggy’s memoirs, of which there are three versions: a raunchy tell-all published in 1946 (her family allegedly wanted to buy every copy in New York, just to get it out of circulation); a slimmer volume from 1960, which focussed on her professional life, more befitting a “serious” art collector; and a final one, from 1979, integrating the previous two. I took copious notes. I made brainstorming documents. All of which is to say: I was terrified to break ground. To start actually adding my words to Rebecca’s. To futz around in her scenes and put some of myself into them.
I made a set of rules, almost like Odysseus getting bound to the mast in preparation for hearing the sirens’ song. I wanted to guard against the creative impulses I feared would emerge and leave too much of my residue in the book. The first rule was, essentially, do no harm: leave everything alone unless there was an error, or a note from Rebecca about something she needed to add or fix, or a scene that had been written several different ways. I slipped on her stylistic tics like a garment I was borrowing: Use more sentence fragments. Let the paragraphs stay long. Let the quotation marks stay off. Some of this felt intuitive, the text teaching me its rhythms. My abundant em dashes started to feel loud and clunky, like roadblocks dropped into her tight, sinuous sentences.
I committed to keeping the prose full of proper nouns: the specificity of brand and street. The fact that the Swiss wine Beckett wanted to buy James Joyce for his fifty-sixth birthday was Fendant de Sion; that he wanted to buy him a walking stick made of Irish blackthorn. It was a pleasure to get close to Rebecca’s sensibility through her taste, her eye, her feel for materials. One of the great things about our friendship had been giving each other fascinating bits of information; in this curious posthumous entanglement, that curation was continuing.
Most of the notes Rebecca had written to herself were instructions, but a few were harsher: What the fuck you don’t have her voice at all. This is so formal and detached. Read the earlier stuff! These sharpened my own anxiety, of course. Would I manage to find, or even approximate, the bold voice she’d reprimanded herself for failing to summon?
I decided to reread “The Torn Skirt,” in order to get deeper inside her prose, an earlier version of her style. The novel is easily inhaled in one go, like a trim line of coke—indeed, two of its characters do coke together off the cover of “Go Ask Alice”—and explores both the gravitational pull of self-destruction and the strange hold women can have on one another. I found myself most moved by the moments of vulnerability and desire: a sex worker aspires to go to a school she has imagined, where you can specialize in drawing maps; she overdoses so she’ll end up in the hospital, because she wants to feel clean, and perhaps to be taken care of. I wanted to bring a few more moments of tenderness to Peggy’s character. In her memoirs, her voice is ruthlessly unsentimental, pointedly refusing introspection and self-pity, but Rebecca had begun forging a different voice for her, with more access to inner depths.
Rebecca had once told me that she loved writing about Peggy because she was drawn to her “rarefied world”—so different from the ugliness she’d explored in her first two books. But when I reread “The Torn Skirt” it struck me that Rebecca’s work was less about the distinction between ugliness and beauty and more about their interrelation. Peggy’s “rarefied” life was full of ugliness—Laurence’s abuse; a botched nose job that shaped her face forever—and the characters living in “uglier” landscapes in Rebecca’s earlier books are always hungry for enchantment. In “The Torn Skirt,” Rebecca describes a young runaway gazing at a lane lined with cherry trees: “The blossoms and the bird seemed so wrong, like I didn’t deserve to see all that. All that beauty.”
It was clear from the beginning that the bulk of my work would involve Peggy’s love affair with Beckett. This was some of the unwritten material Rebecca had been most invested in. Summarizing her vision for her publisher, she wrote: