“You are an oil spill,” Green writes to her husband, in plain text. “But from an airplane the catastrophe is gorgeously baroque.” This is all she writes of Wallace the hero, Wallace the icon, aside from the title and a mention of the time some asshole emailed her to say that people know her only through her husband (with which she agrees). She stays far enough from his public life that she doesn’t even include his name and hardly alludes to his work. This is private grief made public, and for her, without anything like the distance to see his death as sublimely complex. Green does describe the day she returned to her house to find her dogs distraught and her husband hanged. After she called the police, she cut him down herself. “I worry I broke your kneecaps when I cut you down,” she writes. “I keep hearing that sound.” The authorities arrived with a therapist with “the first name of a vacuum cleaner or a stain remover: Hoover, Kirby, Comet.”
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