author's wife ID
June 7, 2024 8:02 AM   Subscribe

Long ago I read a memoir by a fiction writer whose wife died after a fall down the stairs outside their house. I could have sworn the writer was J.G. Ballard. But according to Wikipedia, his wife died of pneumonia. Who am I thinking of?
posted by uans to Writing & Language (10 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Michael Peterson? His wife Kathleen was found dead at the bottom of stairs inside their home. He was tried and convicted of her murder. There was a TV miniseries made of it.
posted by OrangeDisk at 8:07 AM on June 7, 2024 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: No, not him.
posted by uans at 8:16 AM on June 7, 2024


Is it David Niven?
posted by taltalim at 8:24 AM on June 7, 2024 [1 favorite]


https://www.jgballard.ca/criticism/jgb_pringle_kindness.html mentions a Ballard character (Miriam, in The Island dying after a fall, and points out that it may have been a thinly-veiled autobiographical hat-tip to his wife's recent death from "galloping pneumonia." So maybe Ballard is still who you're thinking of, but the wires between his story and his story got crossed?
posted by adekllny at 8:39 AM on June 7, 2024 [1 favorite]


J. G. Ballard wrote a short story, "The Dying Fall," in which the narrator's wife, Elaine, dies along with 19 other tourists in the fictional collapse of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
posted by beagle at 8:42 AM on June 7, 2024


Best answer: That's weird, I could have sworn that Ballard's The Kindness Of Women had a scene where the wife has a deadly injury from a fall down stairs while on vacation (in Spain?). I don't have access to the book right now. I'm sure there's someone out there who does.....
posted by Bigbootay. Tay! Tay! Blam! Aargh... at 10:05 AM on June 7, 2024


Now I'm going a bit batty trying to remember who this was. I swear I read about it and made a mental note to keep people from walking down the outside staircase at my own house. Which I had in fact fallen down once.
posted by BibiRose at 10:21 AM on June 7, 2024


Best answer: The Kindness of Women definitely has a whole episode of Ballard's narrator's wife falling and sustaining brain damage and eventually dying of the injury. Content warning for the sex the narrator and wife have after the injury, I had to return the book to the library early because it icked me out so hard (it was the second time I was reading the book, but I think I read it the first time before I birthed a child, and after going through labor the sex scene was just beyond what I could handle.)
posted by Lawn Beaver at 12:07 PM on June 7, 2024


Response by poster: I am beginning to think I must have read The Kindness of Women, although I don’t remember doing so. There are so many details I distinctly remember (or imagine that I do)— that she was wearing a two piece bathing suit when she fell, that he thought she would have eventually have taken lovers had she lived, his being “relieved of his virginity” after her death by a woman standing against a washing machine. Certainly i do remember that he raised their three children on his own—which is fact.
I don’t know how much I should be worried about my memory. I am 70
posted by uans at 4:44 PM on June 7, 2024


You are not losing your mind: I think Ballard intertwined so much of his "real" life and his fantasies into his fiction, and his "voice" is so distinctive and has become so familiar, that it's easy to "remember" parts of his work that don't exist, simply because they "should" be in there.

I myself am convinced that the wife tripped down an outdoor stone stairway at a villa in Spain by the sea. Did I remember reading this, or just imagine this? Either way, I'm sure that the planes of her face formed a neural interval, like the angle between two walls, and as she tumbled to her death, the music from the balconies was overlaid with the sounds of sporadic acts of violence......
posted by Bigbootay. Tay! Tay! Blam! Aargh... at 8:11 PM on June 7, 2024


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