The Wednesday, November 9 edition of The Dallas Morning News included an obituary that was written by the deceased. It is rather long; here is a link (which might expire) and four screenshots to try to catch it all.
I enjoyed reading this, but it also reminded me of a scene from Young Hearts Crying, a Richard Yates novel. In the scene, a writer is working on a short biographical statement to go with his photo in his soon-to-be-published debut book; he gives the draft bio to his wife.
And this was the finished copy he brought out for Lucy's approval:Michael Davenport was born in Morristown, New Jersey, in 1924. He served in the Army Air Force during the war, attended Harvard, lost early in the Golden Gloves, and now lives in Larchmont, New York, with his wife and their daughter."I don't get the part about the Golden Gloves," she said.
"Oh, honey, there's nothing to 'get.' You know I did that. I did it in Boston, the year before I met you; I've told you about it a hundred times. And I did lose early. Shit, I never even got beyond the third—"
"I don't like it."
"Look," he said. "It's good if you can work a light, self-deprecating touch into something like this. Otherwise, it's—"
"But this isn't light and it isn't self-deprecating," she told him. "It's painfully self-conscious, that's all it is. It's as though you're afraid Harvard may sound sort of prissy, so you want to counteract it right away with this two-fisted nonsense about prizefighting. Listen: You know these writers who've spent their whole lives in college? With their advanced degrees and their teaching appointments and their steady rise to full professorship? Well, a lot of them are scared to put that stuff on their book jackets, so they get themselves photographed in work shirts and they fall back on all the dumb little summer jobs they had when they were kids: 'William So-and-so has been a cowhand, a truck driver, a wheat harvester, and a merchant seaman.' Don't you see how ludicrous that is?"
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