Surely someone this enmeshed in an ambitious project couldn’t die in the midst of realizing it. If I was being honest with myself, and I probably wasn’t, there was a kind of magical thinking embedded in the pleasure of hearing Rebecca talk about her book, which was about the life and times of Peggy Guggenheim, the legendary heiress and art collector. Rebecca had been working on it for a decade, and for the past four years she’d been sick: lung cancer that spread to her bones, and then her brain.
The last time I visited Rebecca in the hospital, in September, 2022, we spent the afternoon researching hospice options and talking about her novel.
