Edie Windsor - A Wild and Precious Life

Edie Windsor and I met for the first time when she was interviewing different writers to help her craft a memoir. It happened to be the eighth anniversary of the day Id met my husband, so I went in with the attitude that even if I didnt get hired, I was lucky to get a chance to thank the woman who made our marriage possible, in person, on such an important day in our personal history; a cool little footnote to add to our story.

She took appointments in her apartment at 2 Fifth Avenue, just above the arch at Washington Square Park. When I got off the elevator on her floor, she was already striding toward me down the hallway, beaming with arms outstretched, her door open behind her. The light spilling out created a sort of background halo effect, and with her body-hugging black suit, silver nails, bright pink lipstick, and perfectly styled blond hair, I felt for a moment that Id fallen into the opening number of an old Hollywood musical and that she was about to break out in song.

Instead, she placed her hands on my cheeks, gave me a kiss, and began talking.

When I left three and a half hours later, I walked down to the park and sat on a bench, more than a little dazed. It was early springtime and warm, the sunwas shining, and my mind was racing with ideas about how to best help tell her story.

Id known the CliffsNotes going inher Supreme Court case that overturned Section Three of the Defense of Marriage Act, a forty-four-year love affair and how the second half of that relationship had been spent helping care for her partner, Thea, whod been diagnosed with MS. In fact, Id heard the narrative so many times that before our meeting I wasnt even sure I wanted to rewrite something that I thought had already been heard a thousand times.

But the stories she told they were full of family intrigue, wild sex, a jungle rescue, and heartbreak, all set against huge cornerstones in American history. I was overjoyed when I learned she chose me to work with her, and I spent the next several months collecting hours and hours of audio and filling notebooks, poring over old slides and boxes of love letters.

One of the first lessons Edie unintentionally taught me was to check an ageist stereotype I hadnt realized I had. During our first official interview, I started off with a question, and her answer was about a completely different subject. Senility, I thought nervously. She was eighty-seven at the time, hard of hearing, and starting to forget words, much to her fury. Goddamn it to hell, shed swear. I should have started this fucking thing years ago.

I realized that while her answer didnt initially reflect my question, it was because she wanted to provide context first, and twenty minutes later, shed loop back to the subject at hand, her answer so much richer for it. Shed also given me thirty new questions to ask based on everything else shed spoken about. This was a woman with so much history and such a deep memory that there was no simple answer to anything. She might not have been readily able to conjure up words like website or annulment, but she could recall with perfect clarity conversations that had taken place in 1949.

Once I put together an initial outline and some chapters for her, I also discovered she was both a phenomenal and intimidating editor, with an eagle eye for detail. Horse manure, she wrote and underlined in one margin, when Id accidentally transposed the name of a 70s disco song with a 60s mambo. In another instance, shed told me about a dinner party she attended where she smoked pot for the firsttime and how it had radically intensified the flavor of everything she ate. She couldnt remember precisely what the meal was, though, and as is standard when ghostwriting a memoir, I used creative license to make it Indian food, thinking that the spices would have been especially wild for someone whod never gotten stoned before.

Nobody in the Hamptons was making Indian food back then, she said when I turned the pages in, crossing everything out. After digging through Theas old cookbook collection, I realized that of course everyone was obsessed with French cuisine at the time. This had been the era of Julia Child, and when I reminded her of this, the memory snapped back in place.

Thats how we worked, and after every session, shed grasp my cheeks in her hands, kiss me, and say, You and me, were good. When we sold the partially completed book in August of 2017, we planned to spend the fall embedded in her apartment and her house in Southampton to finish. We had an interview scheduled for just after Labor Day, but she canceled because shed gotten ill and had to be hospitalized. Since she already knew her discharge date, we rescheduled for the following week. She died on the twelfth of September.

Our aim had always been for me to interview friends and members of her family to help fill in holes or jar more memories. Theyll know the details, shed tell me, and I had a running list of everyone she wanted me to speak to. In the wake of her death, though, I didnt know how to proceed. Edie was so particular, I felt there was no way I could continue writing in her voice without her there to sign off. Since wed gotten so far in the process, her spouse and closest friends insisted she would have wanted me to finish it. I wanted to keep working on the book as well, but it was a paralyzing prospect.

As it turned out, she had left me a gift. I knew she had hundreds of files that we hadnt looked at yet. Well get to those, shed tell me. Theres all sorts of good stuff we can use. Once the shock of losing her began to settle, I started to sort through them. I found individual files on all of her family members and friends, filled with letters and photographs. There were stories shed written for a creative nonfiction class she took in the early 2000s, old term papers from the 1960s with her musings on analysis, stacks of dreams shed written down, family member obituaries, andmeticulously detailed day calendars that dated back to 1953, which included everything from playbills of Broadway shows shed seen to lists of specific pieces of furniture shed bought and how much they cost. I could now accurately trace her every move through life down to the exact address and had all the tiny details that bring a story to life.