Jim O'BrienSend a message to

Jim O'Brien

Jim O'Brien

(The following is a memory shared by Luisa Passerini, who had trouble logging into this site.) I met Marilyn in New York City more than thirty years ago, I think at a friend’s party. We soon became very good friends, and I enjoyed this friendship, which did not save me from Marilyn’s witty and sometimes caustic remarks. Many of her jokes, always punctual and funny, still make me smiling deep inside myself. I cannot evoke my memories of her without situating them visually in the many places where we met. First around Washington Square, at the Department of History or in her nearby apartment, where I was a guest until I got a flat of my own in the same building. Then in Italy: in Florence, Bologna, Bergamo, Turin, Pavarolo (when she came to visit me and my husband Corrado in our country house), and especially on the Elba island, where we had wonderful vacations on the seaside, together with other friends. We kept meeting in New York, where we went to the cinema and the opera, visited the Frick collection and the Morgan library, had lunch at the Metropolitan Museum, while also sharing many political and intellectual discussions. Her thought was admirably clear and sharp. I remember we quarreled bitterly on postmodernism and poststructuralism, because I resented her destructive criticism of both. The last time we met was at MOMA, in April 2016, on a Sunday when I was rather ill. Marilyn was very supportive and encouraging, and took me to have tea and cake afterwards. She was ill too, in a different way, but talked about her illness with great lucidity and calm. It so happened that I had been thinking of her on the day she died, wondering which pungent and unprecedented remarks she would make on the new US government the next time we would meet. Now I am left to imagine what she would have said. But my imagination is weak without her. So many thanks, Luisa Passerini

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