5 June 2017
When a friend texted me the news that Denis Johnson had died, I was deep inside my everyday life, far away from the world of fiction, at the back of an Italian joint in Boston's north end, gathered around a table of family members raising our glasses during a celebratory dinner for my daughter, who had just graduated from law school. I stared at my phone-hidden beneath a tablecloth-and felt a sensation of sadness and grief but also, weirdly, of elation and gratitude, because when a beloved writer dies there's a different vibration in the world, a quiver, a paradoxical pain in the fact that the corporeal body is gone but the work remains.
