Re-reading The Year of Magical Thinking. Not sure why I find this book so compelling, but I’ve read it several times. Maybe I’ll figure it out this time.
Here’s my Magical Thinking factoid: my brother was working as an emergency room social worker for New York Presbyterian Hospital at the time John Gregory Dunne died. When I read about the social worker calling Joan ” a pretty cool customer,” I wondered if my brother had been the social worker. I was pretty sure he was: I could hear him saying “pretty cool customer.”
For some reason, I didn’t actually ask him about it until long after I read the book. When I did mention the title of the book, my brother immediately said, “It wasn’t me!”
He says lots of people have asked/assumed it was him, but no: he looked up whether or not he was on duty that night, and while he knows who did utter the famous phrase, it wasn’t him.
(and: he says he was relieved: that line is apparently featured in the play of the same name. My brother say he’s glad not to be part of literary history as the social worker who calls a recently bereaved woman “a pretty cool customer.”)
So that’s it. My factoid.