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Katie Roiphe's books include several works of non-fiction – including the essay collection In Praise of Messy Lives – and a novel, Still She Haunts Me, which was published in 2001. The director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University, Roiphe's most recent book is The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, which explores the final days of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak and James Salter.
Why did you write your new book?
Kind of perversely, I picked the one subject under the sun that makes me the most panicked, uncomfortable and anxious, and forced myself to think about it for seven years. I came close to dying when I was 12. I stopped breathing in a taxi on the way to the hospital and the driver had to carry me into the emergency room, where they gave me oxygen. I ended up having half of one of my lungs removed, and spending a year in and out of the hospital. I've been sort of obsessed with the confrontation with death since then. This book really began in that time. I wanted to understand how one manages the panic of death, the fear of it. This book was my effort to see how a few extraordinary minds worked on the problem of death. Often, when someone wrangled out of me at a cocktail party what I was working on, they would say: "God isn't that depressing." But it wasn't. For me, if anything, it was uplifting to look very closely at these deaths. It's slightly taboo, still, to focus so intensely on a death, and for me there was something freeing about it.
Whose sentences are your favourite?
Virginia Woolf's because of their grace and precision. She can put enormously complex and dazzling ideas into absolutely fluid, deceptively simple prose. A Room of One's Own is one of the most impressive works of non-fiction ever written, and even her letters and diaries are unmatched in their eloquence.
Which books have you reread most in your life?
The House of Mirth, Light Years, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One's Own, The Company She Keeps, The Silent Woman, Can You Forgive Her? Illness as Metaphor, Anna Karenina, Speedboat.
What's the best romance in literature?
Gary Gilmore and Nicole Baker in Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song – the relationship between the killer and his paramour is deranged and moving at the same time, intensely pathological yet recognizable, blazingly self-destructive, but romantic. Mailer's huge achievement in going into both of their heads, and creating their voices, has been forgotten or downplayed in the annals of literary history. In close second are the profound explorations of love in Albert Hayes In Love and Graham Greene's End of the Affair.
What's the best death scene in literature?
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which is brutal and honest and beautifully rendered. It is one of the few death scenes in which a writer examines the transformations of the death bed, both of the dying person and those around them. There are also several great memoirs of dying: Christopher Hitchens's Mortality, Harold Brodkey's This Wild Darkness, and not quite memoir, but almost: the brilliant poems John Updike wrote on his deathbed, Endpoint.