THE TRAGIC PAPERS

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

The famous Annabella Quigley is dead after living for nine years in letters and journals by  the author Sharon Olenik. Quigley had become a city-dweller, notwithstanding her rural origin, and composed most of her work sitting at her “broad wooden plain of a kitchen table” at her small but warm apartment uptown. She was born nearly a decade ago, when the first installment of Olenik’s “Annabella’s Edits” series, a bleakly hilarious holiday roundup titled “Santa Brought Me Nothing And I Am Passing It On To You,” was sent to Quigley’s then-boyfriend Bradley Peltier. She died a month ago in an uncharacteristically short missive titled “Depleted Pants.” And now the full set of dispatches, four hundred in all, have been collected by Peltier. A estimable work, and remarkable in many ways—remarkable for the dynamism, complexity and passion of the character, for the self-awareness Quigley wields (or rather, the self-awareness with which Olenik yields Quigley), for the effortlessly effulgent discursions into local history, environmental policy, and female sexuality that sparkle like chips of mica set into a road that is always leading somewhere. The dominant tone, the pulse of the work, is hope. “The other day I watched your face reflected in the mirror as you showered,” Quigley writes in an early note to her fictional boyfriend, Peltier’s doppelgänger Jeremy Keane. “That’s an unguarded moment, no? What I saw made me wonder if you truly believe that change can be for the better. You seem too often trapped rather than transported.” Both Keane (in the fiction) and Peltier (in life) were at once beneficiaries and victims of this quicksilver intelligence. Quigley married Keane only after sending a lengthy proviso (title: “I’m Going To Go Ahead and Do This, Though I Know I’m Going to Immediately Regret It, And Just As Immediately Set About Making You Regret It As Well”) and soon took to complaining that the marriage restricted her ability to show love, especially carnal love, to others. Separated within a year and divorced before their second anniversary, they nevertheless remained friends, and maintained an attraction to one another, to the point where they conceived three children over the next decade, first a boy and then twin girls. High spirits accompanied their co-parenting, and they navigated their way through a health scare in which Quigley, a few months shy of her forty-third birthday, was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer.  It is striking to watch as the final year of Quigley’s writings settle into solemnity. It is as if she has lost her velocity. Only the title and the sign-off {“See You In the Tragic Papers”) of the final installment carry the wit of her earlier work, and even then, the sense is that of a woman exhausted, of playfulness not just deferred but defeated. “Beauty flew off of me like sparks once,” Annabella wrote, “and I didn’t even think about the fact that a foot away, or two, or three, those sparks were going out, that they were vanishing or falling to the ground.” Peltier’s experience with Olenik was similar. “Sharon was always a beacon,” he wrote in his introduction to the collection. “But the light has dimmed to the point that I feel the slightest bit nervous about following it into the shore. That, more than anything, keeps me out at sea.” True to his word, Peltier drowned last week when he fell from his sailboat, the Arabella (“not a typographical error,” he explained in his introduction, “but the closest I could come to her without feeling overwhelmed”). An investigation is underway. He will be buried, conceptually at least, with Quigley.