Dorothy Gallagher's works include two volumes of memoir-How I Came into My Inheritance and Strangers in the House-as well as a biography of the Italian American anarchist Carlo Tresca and, most recently, Lillian Hellman- An Imperious Life. She lives in New York.
A touching tribute to a beloved husband and a shared literary life. --Kirkus Reviews Dorothy Gallagher tells us beautifully the things worth knowing. This book breaks my heart. --Susan Minot The 'you' Dorothy Gallagher addresses in her exquisitely made new book is her late husband; the stories she tells him--moments recalled from their time together, lapidary dispatches from her years since his death--provide us the rarest of opportunities: hearing the very breath of others. This is not a chronicle of grief--it's a distillate of life itself. --Daniel Okrent With the deliciously crisp lack of sentimentality that has characterized both her style and her stance from the start, Dorothy Gallagher turns to a subject that would be perilous for most writers but which here gives even greater scope for her striking gifts: bereavement. These diamond-hard essays, each devoted to 'things'--not lofty things, just things: clothes, pigeons, typewriters, friendships found and lost, sofas, the medical apparatus that inevitably became part of her and her late husband's life--evoke the writer's grief, and hence her marriage, with remarkable power. --Daniel Mendelsohn