But Kim didn’t stop writing. In the last decade of her life, she finished four more novels and sent them directly to her literary archive at the Schlesinger Library (Radcliffe/Harvard) where researchers can access them. Among Kim’s unpublished works, there is a memoir, My Sister and the Kabbalist, about the death of her sixteen year-old sister when Kim was five years old, and a novel, Kaddish for My Sister, in which Kim invents the life her sister might have lived had she not died. There is also Black Girl, White Girl, an epic novel about identity based on Kim’s growing up in a Black part of Los Angeles.
Kim used to be a brilliant “performer,” an easy, inspired speaker, quick on her toes, but a shy, introverted part of her always struggled with the requirements of the publishing world, the necessity to “take your book out” into the world, in person. The ever-rising demands that authors do their own marketing, social media, platform building, publicity… felt untenable.
There were two small exceptions from her no-more-publishing rule. We co-authored our couples “tool kit,” Lesbian Marriage: A Love and Sex Forever Kit (March 2014) when gay marriage became legal nationwide. The other exception was Kim’s short memoir, My First Year in the Country (Sept. 2014).
Around 2016-17, Kim felt she had “nothing more to say.” This seemed to be an ironic ending to a writer’s life, so everyone encouraged her to write a diary about having nothing more to say. In the summer of 2018, Kim did just that, and by the end of some hundred pages, she found the start of another novel. The theme had followed her for as long as I knew her: the permeability of time. It’s the story of a young woman who keeps driving off cliffs in order to break through the boundary of time. Two years later, a solid first draft was finished and we were as usual discussing and editing it together, when a massive stroke cut her short. It was one week before her 80th birthday. This last unfinished novel, At Midnight God Enters the Garden of Eden, can also be accessed at the Schlesinger Library.
Part of my intention with this new website that I call my “Kim Museum” is to keep her present in her readers’ mind. The other part is to let readers, students, teachers, researchers, publishers know that Kim’s archive at the Schlesinger Library is a treasure trove of papers, letters, diaries, early drafts, photographs, videos and films illuminating Kim’s life. It will also hold her daughter’s and my own papers—the written and photographic record of our thirty-five years of writing, editing, and living together.
Access to Kim’s archive is reserved for scholarly purposes.
