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:
Which is to say, Beckett never called Peggy Miss Moneybags, as Rebecca had others doing. And Peggy knew Beckett was too talented to remain Joyce’s amanuensis for long. To Rebecca, their love embodied not only the thrill of lust but also the consolidating force of being fully witnessed by another person. As I started reading about the affair in various biographies and in Peggy’s memoirs, I kept coming across passages I wanted to send to Rebecca. In a letter to a friend, Peggy had written, “I am in Paris working hard for my gallery and fucking.” I wanted to text Rebecca right away: it was everything we loved! Then, when I read through one of the files she’d left, I found a version of that fragment typed out. She’d wanted to include this letter in her novel. Of course she had.
In her draft of the scene where Peggy and Beckett first meet, Rebecca had left gaps in the prose, open spaces that felt essential to constructing their dynamic. “I kept staring at him,” Rebecca had written. “I noticed the way he , and how he .” Was Peggy drawn to Beckett’s elusive gaze into the middle distance, as a sign of his rich but opaque inner life? Or was she drawn to the way he licked his lips, or ran his tongue across his teeth, betraying sexuality beneath his intellectual gravitas? Or how about some startling glimpse of his innocence, the way he jerked his suspenders like a little boy? It all felt like a haunted game of Mad Libs, but the stakes were high; it would be easy to reduce the attraction to something more trite and familiar than what Rebecca had intended.
Reading more about Peggy and Beckett, I started to realize how messy and desperate the affair had been. There were just a few blissful weeks of consuming passion, and then a long, ragged aftermath, when Beckett slept with other women and refused to make promises; when Peggy kept coming back to him, thinking she could offer him the understanding he didn’t even know he craved. This was distinctly different from what Rebecca had described to me—bliss and triumph—and I had to work to get a feel for the distinctiveness of her angle.
In Peggy’s memoirs, I found glimpses of dynamics that Rebecca might have been interested in developing: “My passion for Beckett was inspired by the fact that I really believed he was capable of great intensity, and that I could bring it out. He, on the other hand, always denied it, saying he was dead and had no feelings that were human.” It took me a while to understand that Rebecca was not seeing the relationship through rose-tinted glasses. Instead, the dissonance between the received opinion and her own pointed to her belief in the ways a relationship can matter more than its surface suggests. Peggy wrote of stubborn attraction, evoking cinematic scenes: Beckett walking her back home to a flat on the Île Saint-Louis, then leaving once they reached her doorway, not wanting to go upstairs and risk sleeping together again.
Sometimes when I imagined these scenes I pictured Rebecca instead of Peggy. It wasn’t that they looked alike—Peggy was sturdy and famously self-conscious about her looks, whereas Rebecca had an ethereal, witchy grace, with raven hair and delicate features—but because Rebecca’s version of Peggy had more than a few traces of Rebecca in it. I kept picturing Rebecca laughing as she crossed a bridge over the moonlit Seine, or awestruck by “Bird in Space” in the midst of Brancusi’s messy studio. Wherever I looked for Peggy, I found Rebecca, and I realized that I was building Peggy from some of the parts of Rebecca I missed the most.
Last May, eight months after Rebecca died, Herb held a memorial service upstate. It was a rainy day, and we gathered in a barn overlooking wet green hills. Rebecca’s best friend, Janet, described the early days of their friendship, in the nineties, as twentysomethings running around downtown Manhattan, where they lived next door to Vincent Gallo and saw Kim Gordon at the corner bodega. Rebecca loved when the fruit at Dean & Deluca went on sale, fifteen minutes before closing each day, and when the store discontinued this practice, she wrote an angry letter: “This is a failure to invest in your future customers.”
Gary Shteyngart, a fellow-teacher at Columbia, remembered Rebecca’s beloved “Anti-heroines” seminar, which celebrated rebellious, difficult literary characters—from Emily Brontë’s wild Cathy, shivering on the windy moors, to Jean Rhys’s tearful drunks. (Peggy would have fit right in.) It was his mistake, Gary said, to schedule his own seminar, “The Hysterical Male,” at the same time as hers. They were planning to have their classes face off in a beer-pong match at the end of the semester, Hysterical Males vs. Anti-heroines, but he had to call it off once he realized his students would be outnumbered.
Near the end of the service, Herb’s mother described the pieces of paper scattered around Rebecca’s hospital bed, looking like crumpled butterflies—all notes for her novel. Herb shared a diary entry that Rebecca had asked him to read at her memorial: reflections she’d written when Ada was a toddler, watching her play in a patch of wildflowers and trying to articulate her astonishment that she’d created such a perfect daughter.
After the service, we ate pizza, the slices so hot their cheese was sliding off. Ada came over and asked if she could hold her umbrella over my five-year-old daughter’s head, and then stood there shielding her, at her own mother’s memorial, so my daughter could eat her pizza in the rain.
This summer, as my deadline for submitting the manuscript inched closer, I decided to visit Paris, where the unwritten portions of Rebecca’s book were set. I had research funds that would soon expire, and I imagined Rebecca loving the idea. Get on the fucking plane! she’d text. Find someone to flirt with in Montparnasse! I wanted to let the city grant me the texture I knew the prose would need. And I think that, in a way I couldn’t quite articulate, I wanted to populate the prose with more vectors of influence; to make the process more than just a straight line connecting me and Rebecca. When it felt like a triangle—me, Rebecca, and Peggy; or me, Rebecca, and Paris—it felt less like I was stealing what was hers, or futilely trying to replicate it, and more like I was working with the same materials she’d worked with.
In Paris, I took my daughter to Fouquet’s, the restaurant just off the Champs-Élysées where Peggy and Beckett went the night they fell for each other. But in the opulent dining room, with its beaten-copper bar and velvet banquettes, I sensed no traces of Peggy, only the distance between what this place had been and what it had become: tourists paying too much money for the chance to eat bland, buttery snails.
My daughter, on the other hand, was thrilled. She could feel that it was a special occasion, and she was barely able to let her fries cool before cramming them into her mouth, making me submit again and again to the ritual mortification of asking our waiter for more ketchup. She was delighted by the fact that her basket was lined with a faux Parisian newspaper. “Look, Mama!” she said. “It’s the Eiffel Tower under my fries!”
I was struck by sudden pleasure, almost a pang, at the sight of my daughter falling in love with this world, and then by a stab of grief. As her tiny foot kicked my leg, pumping up and down with excitement, I remembered Rebecca’s voice breaking as she told me about her liver and said, I just want to spend these last few months hanging out with Ada.
It was only when I ventured onto the quieter streets of Montparnasse, where Peggy’s affair with Beckett unfolded, that I finally started to feel the sense of haunting I’d been seeking. I passed traffic islands that could have been the one where Peggy ran into Beckett a few days after they met, and I found the hotel where he had recuperated after being stabbed in the street by a stranger, not long before her gallery opening. Now it was called the Hôtel À La Villa des Artistes, though it seemed too blandly corporate for the name. But a little courtyard still summoned the spectre of its old squalor, of the room that Rebecca had conjured with a brown stain on the wall shaped like an ovary.
Peggy came alive for me once I started to imagine her on these streets. The city seemed dense with details, like a river thick with salmon—I just had to swipe my big paws into the flow. A harried mother pushed her son toward the wooden boats in the Luxembourg Gardens, frustrated that he wasn’t excited enough. A woman smoked in her bathrobe on a balcony on Boulevard Raspail, with the fleeting figures of children playing behind her. I started to imagine Peggy seeing these mothers and missing her own daughter, Pegeen, who at the time was living with her father in the Swiss Alps. (Peggy had an inconstant relationship with her children, who spent large periods of time living away from her, cared for by other people.) I caught sight of a possible emotional thread for the novel: Peggy simultaneously adoring these haphazardly glamorous Parisian mothers and feeling scolded by them for not being enough of a mother herself; her experiences of freedom and self-realization, falling in love and opening a gallery, shadowed by these bittersweet notes of self-recrimination and longing.
I was still trying to figure out what arc Rebecca had imagined for Peggy as a mother. She often let Peggy’s voice become tender when talking about her children, attuned to their bottomless desires and curiosities, describing Pegeen inventing a game that involved listing every name she could think of that began with her mother’s favorite letter, or asking about everyone, Is he a bad person? Is she a bad person? But the kids were also largely elsewhere, so perhaps the key was more about reckoning with their absence.
I was compelled by a scene Rebecca had begun dictating to Herb during her last month: Peggy receiving a letter from Pegeen that worries her, and then trying to share her anxiety with Beckett. What had Rebecca imagined Peggy wanting in this moment? Perhaps for Beckett to dwell with her in this other part of her life, for their affair to be more than just a cloistered thing, and to connect to everything else. I read it ultimately as a necessary scene of frustration: Peggy struggling to integrate the various kinds of fulfillment—romantic, vocational, maternal—that she craved. She and Beckett were madly in love, but their love could survive only under certain secluded conditions, like a rare plant in a particular cave.
In Montparnasse, I went looking for this cave: the apartment, at 14 Rue Hallé, where they’d holed up in bed during the first weeks of their affair. Tucked away on a short street, with a garden nestled at the back, it belonged to Peggy’s friend Mary Reynolds, an artist and a lover of Marcel Duchamp, and was a gathering spot for their Paris set, which included Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, and Mina Loy. Reynolds had invited Peggy to use it while she was in the hospital, and so Peggy brought Beckett to another woman’s bed (Rebecca had titled the chapter “Borrowed Bedroom”), and they fled the world for a while.
Walking away from Reynolds’s flat, I realized how close it was to Montparnasse Cemetery, and I began imagining Peggy and Beckett taking strolls there. Perhaps these tombs were the only thing besides booze that could get Beckett out of bed. Death, at least, felt real to him. Stray bits of a scene started coming into focus. Peggy would joke that she’d want one of the stone sepulchres that looked like a confessional. She would fantasize about her friends visiting her grave, dropping all pretense, and spilling their worst secrets.
On the question of how to end the novel, at least, it turned out Rebecca had left me an answer. Her friend Janet told me that shortly before her death Rebecca had described a vision for a coda: We would jump forward two decades, from the late thirties to the late fifties, when Peggy was settled in Venice, in a palazzo on the Grand Canal. She would be talking to the young Beat poet Gregory Corso, with whom she’d had a strange, vexing friendship, and would mention that, looking back, she realized Beckett had been the great love of her life.
I immediately attached myself to this idea. I had instructions! But I also liked that we’d see a more established Peggy, who had assembled an impressive collection and insured its survival through the war; who’d built a life and a legacy without any man by her side. I imagined Peggy—imagined Rebecca imagining Peggy—also feeling a sense of vindication at Beckett’s fame. And the scene expressed a certain truth about love: often it’s only in retrospect that you can fully understand how it’s shaped you. But was this last idea what Rebecca had wanted from the scene, or only what I saw in it?
It seemed impossible to determine where her ideas ended and mine began, but I had a plan for getting as far away from myself as possible: I’d use the rest of my research funds to finish her book in Venice. Perhaps there, away from my own life—my house, my commute, my to-do lists, my playground circuits—I could be properly possessed and let Peggy’s and Rebecca’s voices overwhelm my own.
I rented a little studio overlooking the Grand Canal, eager to write the final pages by the same green lapping waters Peggy had lived beside. Every day, I woke at dawn and watched the boats go by. Boats full of mail. Boats full of watermelons. Boats full of trash. I loved the fetid grandeur of Venice: the filth of the canals in the early morning, algae clinging to the mossy palazzo walls, stained at the waterline. It made me feel closer to what Peggy had loved; she had written tenderly of the “small dark canals, past dimly lit crumbling palaces . . . where gondoliers assemble to drink wine, past warehouses and closed shops and rats and floating garbage.”
Rebecca’s inspiration for her closing scene was a letter Corso had written to his lifelong friend Allen Ginsberg in 1958, describing an epic evening spent with Peggy at her palazzo:
Rebecca had been struck by the uncategorizable intimacy that Corso and Peggy shared—not romantic, but tinged with the possibility of desire, and layered with reciprocal appreciation. Corso was twenty-seven; Peggy, fifty-nine. From his letters, it seems clear that she wanted something sexual from their relationship, and, though he didn’t want that, he found her compelling: odd, surprising, poignant in her aging hungers.
When I visited Peggy’s palazzo, I found her grave in a corner of the garden, where she was buried beside her beloved Lhasa Apsos and Shih Tzus, fourteen of them, all memorialized on a marble tablet, “Here Lie My Beloved Babies,” with their names carved beneath: Madam Butterfly, White Angel, Hong Kong. There was also a large stone throne, bold and enormous, casting its regal shadow. Once, after visiting Rebecca in the hospital, I texted her a picture of Peggy sitting on this throne, holding two of her dogs in her lap. Immediately Rebecca texted back two words, all caps: “THRONE ENERGY.”
I was shown around the palazzo by Peggy’s granddaughter Karole Vail, an elegant woman in her sixties, a former curator at the Guggenheim Museum, in New York, and now the director of Peggy’s collection. She spoke of her grandmother with admiration but also pain, articulated with tremendous restraint. (As Karole has written, Peggy “tended to be least protective of those people to whom she had the most personal obligations.”)
Karole told me how Peggy had acquired certain pieces—for example, how Karole’s father (Peggy’s son, Sindbad) had suggested that Peggy purchase Magritte’s “Empire of Light”—and she pointed out the original function of each room: Peggy’s bedroom still had her silver Calder headboard; the dining room had its original table, which seemed impossibly narrow. Knowing how much Peggy had loved throwing dinner parties, I asked Karole, “Where did everyone’s plates go?” She said Peggy had mainly thrown cocktail parties. Less table space required.
The more time I spent at Peggy’s palazzo, the more I began to feel a new kind of anxiety: a worry that Rebecca’s character was being obscured by the actual figure of Peggy Guggenheim. I realized I had to leave. I needed to step away from Peggy’s ghost to make room for Rebecca’s.
Back at my desk by the canal, I forced myself to start writing. The first time I typed into one of Rebecca’s documents, I found myself wanting to mark these new bits with my initials or a different font—to designate which parts had come from Rebecca and which from me. It felt wrong to rearrange her paragraphs, to let my imagination wind itself around her words, an invasive species let loose in the ecosystem she’d created.
The work of the third section was twofold—weaving together the Beckett affair and the gallery opening, and figuring out how much of the affair to narrate. I was drawn just as much to the ragged half-life of the affair as to its blissful beginnings. Peggy was dignified by this man’s gaze, and also degraded by it. That tension was compelling to me, and I decided to write into her willingness to keep chasing after him, even as he pulled away from her. She could tell herself that his genius somehow justified his inconstant presence, and perhaps it could connect back to the impulse she’d had to glorify her own father’s absences. (Before his death, he’d moved to Paris for work.) I wrote, It had barely bothered me that my father was gone, I just needed to know that he was doing something extraordinary. I felt the same way about Sam; trusted that his genius could excuse the inconstancy of his presence.
As I typed these words, I grew suspicious: what if this was just a slanted version of the way I felt about my own father? Ultimately, though, I let it stand. It did the psychological lifting that was required, and I was starting to see that, if I was going to do right by Rebecca’s manuscript, I needed to grant myself some freedom. I found a set of spiritual operating instructions in a passage she’d left behind, in which Peggy imagines how, when people hear the name Guggenheim, “they’ll think of vicious colors, of strange beauty, of how I wrecked everything that was proper and timid, in myself, and in this city.” I wrecked everything that was proper and timid in myself. If Rebecca had always carried herself with a boldness that I lacked, then finishing her manuscript shouldn’t be about deference but about stepping into her confidence. Without it, everything would be slack and bland, a thinly veiled collage of biographical nuggets. It would carry the whiff of the dutiful, well-behaved student, a girl meticulously trying to follow the rules.
Working on the paragraphs and scenes Rebecca had left behind, I retyped them into a fresh document rather than cutting and pasting them; the physical process of copying forced me to get inside her prose more fully, noting all her small details and her strutting, winking rhythms. I found my voice getting wryer, harsher, racier. At one point, a lover of Peggy’s is trying to give her directions in bed, and suddenly I heard Rebecca’s scratchy voice offering the rejoinder: “As if I hadn’t had enough practice.” Many of Rebecca’s partial scenes were lusty and visceral, and it felt doubly intimate to imagine how she would have imagined someone else having sex. It was as if we were all together in bed: Peggy, Beckett, Rebecca, me. It felt so populated. It made me anxious—after all, everyone flirts and fucks and pillow-talks in different ways—but it was also weirdly fun. The porousness involved in the writing process began to feel like an extension of the porousness that had felt so exciting, almost illicit, in our friendship. This dissolving of boundaries between us in the text—between our voices, and our ideas—no longer seemed like a form of violence I was guilty of but a necessary movement into a third voice that was distinct from both of us: the voice of the text itself.
I found myself searching for trapdoors in the manuscript, secret passageways that might lead to some part of Rebecca I never knew. Reading Rebecca’s description of Peggy imagining her mother’s lung cancer—“They deigned to show her an X-ray photograph in which it appeared her lung was a white mass. It looked like a full moon”—I couldn’t help imagining Rebecca seeing the full moon of her own tumor on an X-ray screen. And in certain perfect observations—incisive, trimmed of all their fat—I felt I was encountering facets of Rebecca’s own relationship to parenting: “You don’t notice the flawed streets until you are a mother; you really don’t.” Or: “I was too used to the smell of my own milk. It changes you. I can’t describe.” These felt like confessional moments, like getting to hear Rebecca tell me things she hadn’t had the chance to while she was alive.
As I wrote, especially at the ends of scenes, I worried that I leaned too much toward synthesis and sentiment—that I was always reaching for swelling moments of epiphanic insight, their crescendo before the white space, and Rebecca was more understated, more jagged and brutal.
I started to notice a certain recurring dynamic in her scenes: moments of tension often pivoted into moments of shared understanding, by way of self-deprecation. Rather than taking offense, Peggy and Beckett would let themselves become the butt of the joke, and these moments often bloomed into desire. This was a dynamic that felt particular: tension diffused by humor, and then converted to lust. I recognized it from my own better moments in bed—the ones where I didn’t take everything so personally, or seriously—but it was another instance of Rebecca’s acuity. It was something she’d noticed about what it feels like to be getting along with another person. It carried insight. I worked from it.
With each project, you eventually have to surrender the perfect version of the work to make room for what you actually create. You are constantly, in that sense, displacing the sleek silhouette of perfection with its imperfect, bumbling cousin. With Rebecca’s novel, I had to give up on the fantasy in all the usual ways and also other ones. When it’s your own art, and you displace hypothetical perfection with actual imperfection, you are mainly just disappointing yourself; but with Rebecca’s novel I was also disappointing a ghost. Then again, the fact that I was doing this for her somehow made it easier to interrupt the spiral of self-recrimination. Was I going to finish or not? I got back to work.
When it came time to figure out what to do with that final mysterious fragment she’d left behind—“Oh oh oh stone”—I recalled what Herb had said about it: “It was simply the last thing she said, and then something medical intervened. You do not know at the time that this is the end.” In other words, my work here didn’t just involve piecing together her intentions but imagining them. There were certain moments when her voice would not come from beyond the grave to tell me what to do, and I needed to figure it out myself. Oh oh oh stone. I imagined it as something Peggy might think about Beckett—her devotion a weight she could not escape, an anchor that she learned to live with, to regard tenderly, to love.
I thought it would feel good to be done with a full draft, but I was wrong. Finishing felt worse than any other part of the process; I felt Rebecca’s absence more acutely. She deserved this moment, not me. This was what she’d worked toward for years. She wasn’t here to read what I’d written, or to tell me how to make it better. I kept fiddling with passages, refusing to close the document, beginning to realize what should have been obvious from the start: finishing the novel meant saying goodbye to her all over again. ♦
