(For some reason over the last few weeks, I have not been able to get Sarah Pettit out of my mind. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I’ve been perusing old articles of mine to post here on the website, some of which I wrote for her as my editor at Out Magazine. But I think it also has to do with the fact that I miss being able to talk to her about all the incomprehensible things that are going on in the world at present. I would love to hear her comments about the eerie death of Kenneth Lay at Enron, the recent loss of singer Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, the very welcome defeat of George W. Bush’s Guantanamo policies in the Supreme Court, the inanity of the media blitz over the new, totally superfluous, Superman movie. Sarah always had an original and acerbic point of view, but one that was grounded in compassion and a genuine respect for the higher truths. So today, because I feel like it, I am posting a eulogy that my friend Daniel Mendelsohn wrote about Sarah which was read at her memorial. I was, unfortunately, not there to hear it live, which is why I have a copy of it in the first place. Thank you Daniel for writing it and helping me to remember Sarah a little bit better.)

Sarah Pettit (1966-2003)

Sarah’s Eulogy by Daniel Mendelsohn

A note about friendship and literature.

On the morning Sarah died, I had a deadline for an essay about Virginia Woolf and “Mrs Dalloway”—a novel, as so many more people know now than ever knew before, that attempts to give the sense of the entirety of a woman’s life in the course of a single day. I thought a great deal about that novel when I was thinking about what I might say today. Under any circumstances, you realize, it’s extraordinarily difficult it is to give a sense of who someone is, particularly a person you’ve known well, over a long time; but I think it’s fair to say that the task is particularly daunting in the case of someone like Sarah.

If, indeed, I were a book critic reviewing a novel whose main character was Sarah, I’d be inclined to raise a skeptical eyebrow. The daughter of considerable privilege who felt such a genuine alliance with, and commitment to, those who had no privilege at all; the product of exclusive boarding schools and universities (as she was sometimes pleased to remind you) who loved nothing better than to take to the streets, or to sit at Joe Jr’s schmoozing with the Greek counter guy; an outsider, in other words, who was at once profoundly an insider; a person who, her elaborate disquisitions on the virtues of Mariah Carey or Whitney Houston notwithstanding, knew her way so well around the opera or ballet, who navigated between J-Lo and Lincoln Kirstein with equal aplomb; a hardboiled editor who—very famously now—could tell a writer who’d tried to get an extension on a deadline—his lover had AIDS, he’d had a shunt put in his brain, or something horrible, was in the emergency room—that “that excuse may fly in Boston, but not in New York City”—this hardboiled person who, as anyone who ever walked down a New York City street knows, could not pass by a small dog without dropping to her knees and slobbering over it; who loved children and wanted one desperately. (For a long time, on and off, she and I talked about having a child together. “Well,” she said one day after we’d met at a restaurant to discuss the idea, “it’ll have very blue eyes and very high therapy bills.” The most devastating aspect of her illness to her, at the very beginning, was the possibility of not being able to get pregnant.)

And—to continue the list of paradoxes that was Sarah—she was, as we all know, a mover and shaker in the worlds in which she moved—journalisms, politics, the arts—who was given to harrowing bouts of self-doubt, and whose ambition and professional gusto was balanced by deep, and sometime destabilizing, introspection; and whose last, terrible year was characterized by wild oscillations between soul-shattering rage and terror and, sometimes, a terrible lashing out at those around her, on the one hand, and a sweetness so intense, a concern for the rest of us, that you, too, would have a hard time believing it was the same person.

One of the by-products of being such a person was, I now realize, a tendency to compartmentalize her friendships. After Sarah got sick, I found myself spending great swaths of time with a bunch of her intimate friends whom I’d heard about for a long time but hadn’t, I realized, ever gotten to know well in the ten years that I knew Sarah, people whom I have come to love as my own friends—Mayer Rus, Maria Maggenti, Mary, Julian, Roxana, the list goes on and on. I found myself once sitting with Maria one day last year, after a surreal Good Friday that began on Shelter Island and ended up in the emergency room of New York Hospital—a Salvador Dali crisis through the night and into the morning that featured, among other things, a 3 a.m. walk-on appearance by Celeste Holm in full make-up and no, I am not making this up, because I stole Miss Holm’s hospital ID bracelet to prove it—sitting with her, exhaustedly munching on coffee-shop donuts, and the two of us were in a rage against Sarah. “Why had she kept us from one another all these years?,” we kept saying. “Why hadn’t she mixed her friends up more?”

Only now I think I know why. It was as if Sarah herself couldn’t quite believe she was this unlikely character, so many different things to so many people, each of which corresponded, emotionally, to a different kind of person, and a different kind of relationship. This is why (I think) she had such a particular gift for friendship, why her ex-lovers always ended up being her close friends: it was a way of hanging on to all the wildly diverse bits of herself..

This, it only occurs to me now, is why she was specific about who was to speak here today, why she so elaborately specified who was to speak, who in tandem, who alone, who to sing and who to talk. Sarah had strong ideas about what this service ought to be like, and it’s clear, to me at least, that she wanted it to be an embodiment of herself—her self—in all its improbable multiplicity, something that could only be achieved by getting a lot of us up here one after the other. Not (as much as she enjoyed them) a political rally; not an infomercial for Yale University or the tardy, self-promotional generosities of its various nefarious alumni, not an Oscar ceremony showing off how many industry bigwigs she knew, but a kind of emotional collage that would give you a sense of who she was as, above all, a friend.

I’m not sure exactly what part of her elaborate self I myself correspond to, and like that character in the recent Virginia Woolf film I feel I’m failing utterly to do a small thing, which is just give a sense of one person on one day; but since I am here I feel I have an urgent message that I want to give, one that I think was very important to her, which is that Sarah was a wonderful friend. Whatever else she was—and like all of us, she could be difficult, and self-absorbed, and the rest of it—she was that. No one crowed more loudly about the achievements of her friends than Sarah did; no one exulted more in your happinesses, or felt more for your sadnesses. At what ended up being her last birthday party, the announcement she felt moved to make wasn’t about her—when her being there seemed, to us, like a miracle, like a birthday present to us—but about my recent book deal. On the night that deal went down, I went to the hospital to celebrate with her with a bottle of fizzy cider, and when I got there she was on the phone, which her shaking hands could barely dial, calling the New York Times and the New York Post, making sure they knew about it. “Don’t you think this is your business?” she yelled at the hapless publishing reporter at the Times, and hung up on him.

It’s on the subject of books that I’ll close. Not my book, but another one. When Sarah made her will last summer, we talked at the hospital and she asked me if I would be her literary executor. This was at a time when the idea of her actually dying seemed incredible, and my response to her was a flippant one. “Well, you’d better write a fucking book then, don’t you think?” I said, that day in July. As we now know, she had no time for that—although as her literary executor I’ve started to go through her papers, and I was relieved to see, on the very first page of the huge journal that I opened, the Sarah we all knew and loved. “Lots of time on my hands tonight,” she wrote one day a couple of years ago, “since Danny cancelled our dinner after remembering he had an event at the Century Club. Such an effete queen.” Or—more seriously, and much more to the point, to my point this afternoon—this entry written during the summer of 2001, a very hard one for her: “I cannot express how grateful I am for my friends.”

I cannot express how grateful I am to you, my darling girl, who despite your best efforts, managed to make so many friends of your friends. For when I think of the people whom I love best in New York, the friends who are my closest friends here, I realize I met every single one of them through Sarah; that my whole life of friendships here was, ultimately, Sarah’s creation: Hilton Als, Donna Masini, Maria Maggenti, Brooks Peters. I scoffed, that day last summer, when we talked about her will, about the books she might write; but secretly, all along, Sarah, to whom friendship was so important, the most vital expression of the emotional self—secretly, all along, she was composing, creating her magnum opus. She was an author: we are the book.