[b:The Baltimore Book of the Dead|40097597|The Baltimore Book of the Dead|Marion Winik|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1534442202s/40097597.jpg|62150995] is a compassionate, funny tribute to dead friends, acquaintances and people the author would have enjoyed knowing. I couldn't put it down even though one needs to take a breath after each two-page vignette to savor the beautiful writing, the pinpoint characterization. An unexpected treasure which I started again as soon as I'd finished.

This is from her forward:
"As far as death at the dinner table goes, some respectful space must be made for grief. Grief is socially awkward, if not all-out anti-social, difficult to accommodate even in one-on-one conversations. Even now, when I mention that I widowed in my first marriage, or that my first baby was stillborn, I see people's faces fall, and I rush to explain that it was a long, long time ago and it was very sad but I am fine now. I really am. But I am also trying to spare them the awkwardness of having to come up with some appropriate or more likely inappropriate response, perhaps making some well-intentioned but doomed attempt to help me get over it, possibly by implying that it was God's will.
Which brings me back to the time when I was not fine, after those deaths and others, as well, and there I find part of my motivation for writing these books, for dwelling so long in the graveyard for finding a way to talk about it. Ultimately, instead of attempting to flee from the pain of loss, I decided to spend time with it, to linger, to let these thoughts and feelings bloom inside me into something else.
Why do we build memorials, decorate grave sites, set up shrines, stitch an AIDS quilt, paint three murals for Freddie Gray; what are these ghostly white bicycles woven with flowers on Charles and Roland avenues?"
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Brief vignettes of people the author remembers who have died.
Sometimes poignant, sometimes witty, always smartly written. I felt that providing nicknames for the deceased provided a bit more relatability to each - a bit more generality, that they could be stand-ins for anyone with a similarity or relatability that the reader might actually know.
I picked the book up in part because of the title, and expected to find somewhat more about the city. But it was titled more for where the book was written than for where the people lived or stories took place. I found myself trying to figure out where exactly situations happened, which provided another layer of depth to the otherwise succinct snippets of life. ( )

I chose a book by a woman author to read for Women's History Month, and so I picked Marion Winik. For those of you not familiar with her work, she was a local regional writer in Austin, TX and then relocated to the East Coast and became a contributor to NPR's All Things Considered. She has published a series of books including "First Comes Love" about her experiences being married to a gay man that died from HIV. She has also written books about parenting her two boys from that marriage, "Lunchbox Chronicles", and a series of Books of the Dead. She had gotten feedback that talking about death was depressing. I identify with her tales because we are both Jewish, we are about the same age, and both lived in Austin, TX. I admire her strong spirit and her ability to transform her unconventional life into stories that are relatable to many women from our generation. We didn't want conventional families, we wanted careers and to be to follow our dreams. At our age too, we have outlived many close friends and family members, and surviving those deaths increasingly becomes a part of your daily experiences. At the university I work at, we have students that unfortunately die while they are enrolled here. Often it is traffic accidents as the cause of death, but sometimes it is drugs or alcohol. It is a terrible tragedy that their potential and their young lives are cut so short, but we honor their deaths by having Silver Taps ceremonies in the evenings for the students that have passed away. It is certainly sobering, but honoring the dead is not depressing. ( )

An excellent collection of very short essays about various people the author has had some relationship with who have died. Its amazing how much insight and feeling she is able to convey in only a couple of pages. ( )