Author and journalist Katie Roiphe (In Praise of Messy Lives) believes she conceived the idea for The Violet Hour when she was 12 years old and suffering a virulent form of pneumonia. Throughout her long convalescence, she developed an "endless appetite" for books about people dying. Roiphe turned to the comfort of literature to help deal with her experience; to understand and "see the world," she explains, she has "always opened a book." When Roiphe's father died of a heart attack years later, she decided to write The Violet Hour, which examines the last days of six famous writers and artists. Roiphe selected Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak and James Salter because each was "especially sensitive or attuned to death."
Roiphe interviewed a host of people associated with each subject--wives, ex-wives, children, caretakers, friends, housekeepers, nurses--in order to grasp how each artist "faced or did not face... death." The harrowing section about writer Susan Sontag, who beat cancer twice and was challenged a third time with a terminal diagnosis, shows Sontag's ferocious will. She underwent aggressive treatments while intellectually rebelling against death. John Updike also endured grueling chemotherapy, and he chose to work feverishly on new poems about his experience. "He is writing his way out of death."
What Roiphe discovers by closely observing and contemplating each of her subjects in their darkest hours--especially their courage and great flourishes of creativity when at their most vulnerable--surprises her, and the insights she shares are bound to affirm in readers the value and meaning of life. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines