Marjorie Williams--A journalist who made feminism matter.

By Meghan O'Rourke
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2005, at 11:07 AM ET

Imagine being told, at 43, that you have a few months to live. And imagine—among other things—that you have a career deepening in new ways, and two young children, a boy and a girl, who still believe that Santa Claus is real. The truth is, most of us can't imagine anything like it. But this is what Marjorie Williams, a Washington Post columnist who died last January at 47, describes in her extraordinary essay about being diagnosed with advanced liver cancer, "Hit by Lightning: A Cancer Memoir." It appears in The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate, a new collection of her journalism edited by Slate's Tim Noah, her husband. Reading the essay, one is rocked back on one's heels not only by the steady summoning of detail—including the split-second thrill she felt when the doctor first discovered a tumor—but by the fact that she wrote the essay in the first place. " 'I don't want to end my life in some hospital barfing in the name of science," " she recalls telling Tim. " 'I mean it: I want to be realistic about what's happening to me.' " And she was. The essay is the distillation of the gift that Williams, whom I never met, displays throughout the volume: total engagement inextricably connected to a comic detachment—a stoic determination to make the most of her tragic, and at times absurd, situation. ("I savored the things I'd avoid forever. I'll never have to pay taxes, I thought, or go to the Department of Motor Vehicles. … I won't have to be human, in fact, with all the error and loss and love and inadequacy that come with the job.")