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| Mameve Medwed | |
Mameve Medwed, a novelist, critic and essayist whose novels included Mail and How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life, died December 26. She was 79. Noting that she had been praised by one critic as an author with a "light touch and irrepressible sense of humor," the Boston Globe reported that her characters often dwelled in Cambridge, Mass., as well as her home state of Maine, and that her own life "provided rich material for autobiographical essays, some of which she published in the Globe."
Medwed also championed writers whose work, like hers, makes people smile. "I would love to make a little campaign for the comic novel because I always feel that people who write funny stuff are considered sort of, you know, light--l-i-t-e--and are relegated to the children's table," she said in a 2015 interview with the Globe. "All of us who write comedy deal with the same stuff that the deep, heavy, dark people staring in the abyss deal with: love, friendship, death, sorrow, all those things. We just look at it in a skewed way."
Her novels, which also include Minus Me; Of Men and Their Mothers; The End of an Error; and Host Family, are "filled with humor and heartbreak" and established Medwed as "an author readers turned to for enjoyment," the Globe noted.
Novelist Elinor Lipman, a friend of Medwed for decades, said, "We both sent each other everything. If I wrote a blurb, I sent it to her for her approval. We counted on each other, and it wasn't just the writing."
She "was unfailingly radiant," said longtime friend and author Stacy Schiff, adding that Medwed "set the gold standard in that respect. No one did friendship better, no one championed other people's books as did she."
Writer Stephen McCauley, a neighbor of Medwed in Cambridge, recalled that "she was extremely generous to all her writer friends," throwing parties whenever each one published a book. "That was very meaningful for all of us. She was a very loving person and was extremely modest and self-effacing, but at the same time I think she had this core commitment to her work and to helping other writers."
For years, Medwed taught writing at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, "and knew well the challenges aspiring authors faced," the Globe wrote. Mail, her first novel, was published in 1997, the year she turned 55, which, as McCauley noted, perhaps "gave her that much more appreciation for the years of struggle and disappointment that people have, and maybe more appreciation, too, for her own success."