(465 words; posted Saturday, Jan. 4; to be composted Saturday, Jan. 11) |
And They Lived Happily Ever After
Readers of S LATE’s ” Diary” column (written this week by our poetry editor, Robert Pinsky) are often plunged into the melodrama of someone else’s daily life. Will playwright Wendy Wasserstein ever have breakfast with her mother? (She put it off throughout her week on “Diary” duty, finally succumbing Friday.) Will the contractor ever finish the renovation work on novelist Cynthia Ozick’s house? Because this is real life and not fiction, sometimes the week comes to an end without the expected cathartic resolution. In Ms. Ozick’s case, she also feels bad that S LATE readers may have been left thinking ill of her contractor long after she and he had resolved their differences. So Ms. Ozick has supplied a real-life happy ending to her diary, which we have added to in “The Compost.”