STEVE, INSKEEP, host:
And we'll talk next to a woman who makes it her business to say goodbye. Journalist Ann Wroe explained that job in a recent blog entry.
Ms. ANN WROE (Obituaries Editor, The Economist): I don't know what other people's first thoughts may be on Monday mornings, but mine, as the jabber of my husband's radio crawls into my dreams, is has anyone died today?
INSKEEP: Ann Wroe is not the only person who listens or reads for the obituaries first and it's her job, in fact, to write or edit them for The Economist magazine.
We've brought her to a studio in London to talk about the art of the obituary. Welcome to the program.
Ms. WROE: Thank you.
INSKEEP: People must ask you why it is that you're willing to have this as your full-time job - death.
Ms. WROE: Because it seems to me like an opportunity to get into dozens of very interesting lives and I find it endlessly fascinating, not in the least morbid. In fact, we have a tradition in England of rather irreverent and interesting obituaries, they're literary forms really.
INSKEEP: Okay now, let's talk about that because there is this old saying speak nothing but good of the dead and Hunter S. Thompson's obituary - this is a man who killed himself by gunshot, the first sentence is: There were always way too many guns around at Hunter S. Thompson's farm.
Ms. WROE: Yes.
INSKEEP: Getting right to the uncomfortable point.
Ms. WROE: Yes. The way I like to do obituaries is to get to the point and the point may not be the one we first think of. The point with Hunter S. Thompson, suddenly I thought, it's guns. And there's been others, for example, there was Arthur Miller's obituary where I discovered he'd been a carpenter. And somehow that little clue made me realize how beautifully crafted his plays were — that they were like the work of a carpenter putting together a house, if you like. And there will always some little theme that will draw me into the whole body of the obituary that will make the form of it.
INSKEEP: Now you must have to work on these obituaries for quite sometime, even before the people are dead in order to find those details and make literary use of them.
Ms. WROE: Well, I wish that was true, Steve, but I've never written a preemptive obituary. We have got about 10 of them on the stocks. That's a very small number. I've always waited until the people are dead and then I've gone to their books and everything I can find where they are speaking and I try to get inside their heads and inside their voices.
INSKEEP: I wonder if I could point out a joint obituary that you wrote here, of Brooke Astor and Leona Helmsley. You write about them together and contrast them in part in this way - Mrs. Astor was a small, delicate and fine as a Meissen cup, her tailoring, exquisite, and her jewels unobtrusive. Mrs. Helmsley, though, not large, favored loud trouser suits and chunky diamond clips with her mouth made big and cruel by scarlet lipstick. Holding nothing back there.
Ms. WROE: I guess that's true. But I find the mere chronology of a life really doesn't sum up that life for me. I want to get the texture and the sound and even the smell of someone, you know, get right inside the essence of that person.
INSKEEP: How do you approach it when the person you are writing about is clearly a despicable character?
Ms. WROE: Then I usually have fun with them. I'll write something that is quite shocking even to me. I had to deal with the southern sheriff a few months ago, where, at the beginning, he's writing about how he likes kicking Negroes in his words…
INSKEEP: This is a man who was central to the civil rights movement at one point in time.
Ms. WROE: Exactly - who was interesting to me because he was so despicable that he actually tips the civil rights movement into a bit more activity. And therefore, you know, he brought about what he most feared and what the nation most needed. But I started it by having the sheriff thinking of how much he likes dressing up in his boots and his badges and going and clearing out a few blacks and making their lives hell.
And, in a way, I was ashamed of myself for writing it and then in another way I thought, this is the view of the world that's disappearing with this sheriff. And I want readers to remember just how bad this view point was.
INSKEEP: Ever get depressed writing about dead people all the time?
Ms. WROE: No. But that's my own particular view of life and death, I guess, because I don't feel that death is an end. I think it's another adventure. It's a continuation. Therefore, I feel these spirits, both good and bad, haven't gone and I'm merely giving a sort of progress report on what they got up to while they were on earth.
The only time I do feel sad is if it's someone who is young or who has committed suicide, who had the prospect of their life before them and somehow just couldn't manage it or something went wrong.
And there'd been a few obituaries like that. That's worrying, you know, that's difficult to know sometimes quite the tone to take.
INSKEEP: I'd like to raise one other thing, if I might, would you describe for us what happened to you over the last few days in which required us to reschedule this conversation?
Ms. WROE: Yes. I mean, what I had was a minor stroke, which means that I lost the feeling in one side. I've recovered pretty quickly from the physical signs of it, but I thought a little bit to myself, you know, was this another intimation of mortality that I ought to think about?
INSKEEP: Does it get you thinking about who might write your obituary?
Ms. WROE: It sometimes does and if people think they would get to me by, you know, giving a list of where I'd been to school and where I'd worked and what I'd done, they wouldn't get anywhere near me. And this is why I - I've always worried, slightly, that obituaries of me, if they were ever to appear, just wouldn't be about me. And therefore, that challenge, I feel I've got to extend to the people I'm writing about. I've got to try and write about them getting through to their real life and their real thinking.
INSKEEP: Ann Wroe of The Economist. You can find some of her obituaries at npr.org.
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, host:
And I'm Renee Montagne.