The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate [Hardcover]

Marjorie Williams (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 10, 2005

Marjorie Williams knew Washington from top to bottom. Beloved for her sharp analysis, elegant prose and exceptional ability to intuit character, Williams wrote political profiles for the Washington Post and Vanity Fair that came to be considered the final word on the capital's most powerful figures. Her accounts of playing ping-pong with Richard Darman, of Barbara Bush's stepmother quaking with fear at the mere thought of angering the First Lady, and of Bill Clinton angrily telling Al Gore why he failed to win the presidency — to name just three treasures collected here — open a window on a seldom-glimpsed human reality behind Washington's determinedly blank façade.

Williams also penned a weekly column for the Post's op-ed page and epistolary book reviews for the online magazine Slate. Her essays for these and other publications tackled subjects ranging from politics to parenthood. During the last years of her life, she wrote about her own mortality as she battled liver cancer, using this harrowing experience to illuminate larger points about the nature of power and the randomness of life.

Marjorie Williams was a woman in a man's town, an outsider reporting on the political elite. She was, like the narrator in Randall Jarrell's classic poem, "The Woman at the Washington Zoo," an observer of a strange and exotic culture. This splendid collection — at once insightful, funny and sad — digs into the psyche of the nation's capital, revealing not only the hidden selves of the people that run it, but the messy lives that the rest of us lead.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Washington, D.C., is a city ruled by insiders, and few writers have broken through the social and public politics that govern it as eloquently as Williams. This posthumous collection presents a series of remarkably well-observed and intelligent profiles of the great and minor figures who have made D.C. for the past two decades. Williams, a longtime writer for the Washington Post and Vanity Fair, has a fine eye for telling details—the license plates on a bureaucrat's car, the folds of satin in a dying socialite's dress—but it's more than just details that make Williams's profiles so engaging. Underlying each representation is Williams's ability to make her characters as complicated on the page as they are in real life. It's that same concern that governs the heartbreaking personal pieces in the last third of the book, which covers Williams's losing battle with cancer. Here she is on her impending death: "whatever happens to me now, I've earned the knowledge some people never gain, that my span is finite and I still have the chance to rise and rise to life's generosity." In these final pieces, Williams steps out from under the self-effacing veil that made her such a fine journalist and speaks of her own experiences. The result is a collection of writing that dissolves the boundaries between the personal and the political to arrive at an obvious but no less startling conclusion. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"...offers many pleasures and surprises...this collection is a splendid memorial to an elegant prose stylist." -- The Los Angeles Times, November 27, 2005

"A master at capturing human spirit and character in print" -- Karen Algeo Krizman, Rocky Mountain News, November 11, 2005

"Her writing...stands out for what simmers just beneath, whether it's a passage of excavatory reporting or a personal, painful insight..." -- The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, November 28, 2005

"Piercing perceptiveness about the messy human beings lying beneath the portentous personas of great Washington figures" -- David Brooks, New York Times, November 6, 2005

"Williams's journalistic gifts include her delicious use of detail, wicked humor and a psychological insight..." -- The Washington Post, November 17, 2005

... what this book reveals is a woman...cheated by fate, but facing reality unflinchingly and asserting personal honor despite it all. -- David Brooks, The New York Times, November 6, 2005

...combines peerless political anthropology with heartbreaking insight into the complexities of family life and her own struggle with cancer. -- Newsweek, November 21, 2005

A fitting tribute... [Williams was] a master at capturing human spirit and character...readers...simply looking for great writing won't be disappointed. -- The Rocky Mountain News, November 11, 2005

We'ree lucky to have this collection to remind us of what we'll be missing with Marjorie Williams gone. -- The Buffalo News, November 13, 2005

Williams is so knowing about Washingtons folkways...that readers will feel they are sitting down with a world-class political storyteller. -- The Buffalo News, November 13, 2005

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: PublicAffairs; 1St Edition edition (November 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1586483633
• ISBN-13: 978-1586483630
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #328,759 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Marjorie Williams was born in Princeton, N.J., in 1958 and died in Washington, D.C., in 2005. She was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, an editorial columnist for the Washington Post, and a frequent contributor to Slate and the Washington Monthly. Public Affairs has published two posthumous anthologies of Williams's writings. The first, "The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate," was a New York Times best-seller and won the PEN/Martha Albrand Nonfiction Award. A prepublication excerpt in Vanity Fair ("Hit By Lightning: A Cancer Memoir") won a National Magazine Award and was later included in "The Best American Essays 2006." The second collection, "Reputation: Portraits in Power," profiles prominent figures in late 20th century Washington. "The engagement is journalistic," observed Tim Rutten in a Los Angeles Times review of "Reputation," "but the antecedents are in the deep literature of social observation. Jane Austen and Edith Wharton come quickly to mind." About "The Woman at the Washington Zoo," Katha Pollitt wrote, "She was not just the best Washington journalist of her generation, she was one of the best journalists, period." Williams is survived by her husband, Timothy Noah, a senior writer at Slate, and her children, Alice and Will. More information about Williams and her writing is available at womanatthewashingtonzoo.com/

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

78 of 81 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It Is More Than Just The Details, The Stories Come Alive, November 20, 2005

By 

prisrob "pris," (New England USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate (Hardcover)

And I. . . .
this print of mine, that has kept its color
Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null
Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so
To my bed, so to my grave, with no
Complaints, no comment: neither from my chief,
The Deputy Chief Assistant, nor his chief--
Only I complain. . . . this serviceable
Body that no sunlight dyes, no hand suffuses
But, dome-shadowed, withering among columns,
Wavy beneath fountains--small, far-off, shining
In the eyes of animals, these beings trapped
As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap,
Aging, but without knowledge of their age,
Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for death--
Oh, bars of my own body, open, open
Randall Jarrell "The Woman At The Washington Zoo"

Marjorie Williams died of liver cancer last year. Her husband has put together her columns/essays, some of them published and some of them are new, into this book. He titled the book from the poem written by Randall Jerrell. They are extraordinary stories, and the most extraordinary is the story of her diagnosis. She tells us about the physicians she visited, the tests she endured, the support of family and friends, and the hope that she would overcome. We know now, of course, that she did not. But, in the telling of her story and that of many other people and their relationships, she opens up her world to us.

Her columns/essays of the people who inhabit Washington are personal. How Clinton told Gore why he lost the election, and how their relationship mattered. Looking into Richard Dorman's closet and playing ping pong. Barbara Bush, the Head of the Bush household, so frightened her mother-in-law, that she did not want to cross her. We read of the personal stories of Marjorie Williams, her life, her family, women and their careers, her cancer and her legacy. One of the most endearing stories is that of helping her daughter dress as a rock star on Halloween night. She was able to picture her daughter in a prom dress and all of the events in her daughter's life that she might miss if her cancer did not abate.

Marjorie Williams wrote for "The Washington Post" and "Slate" on-line. She was a remarkable woman in many ways. She was able to combine her career with that of wife, mother and friend. She gave to others as we all do, but she did not expect much in return. The love of her family was the highest priority. The liver cancer cut her life short, but it did not stop her from living her life. Her husband, Timothy Noah, edited her columns/essays and in the process brought Marjorie Williams back to life in print.
Highly Recommended. prisrob

61 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Writer, Much Missed, November 12, 2005

By 

A Slate.com Reader (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate (Hardcover)

You will close this book and mourn that there won't be 30 more years of insight and delicious wit from this great writer. She could do everything: the laser-precise profile; social commentary that made you see events with new understanding; personal essays of heart-stabbing clarity.
Her pieces about living with illness and facing death will enter the canon of literature on how to live and die.
Her loss echoes throughout this book, yet it is a volume full of pleasure. Anyone who loves great writing will luxuriate in spending time with this writer working at the height of her powers.

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Sum Of A Brilliant Career, November 19, 2005

By 

C. Hutton "book maven" (East Coast, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate (Hardcover)

The title of journalist Marjorie William's posthumous collection of writings, profiles and columns says it all. The first third focuses on her political interviews with the Washington "elite"; the middle portion is her musings on her family; and the final section is heart-rending as she profiles her four year battle against fate & lung cancer which ended her life at the age of 47 earlier this year.

From an alcoholic literary family, Ms. Williams was brilliant at Harvard, ambitious in her work with Joni Evans at Viking Press before launching another career in her mid-twenties at The Washington Post, and an exacting wordsmith where writing was her gift but her family was her life. (A comparable life of the poet Jane Keynon was published this year by her husband Donald Hall: "The Best Day, The Worst Day." Ms. Keynon was another gifted wordsmith who would also die at the age of 47.)

Her husband picked the best of her observations on life and politics from Vanity Fair and The Washington Post. It is amazing how many politicians would allow themselves to be interviewed by her, when time after time, she would be brutally honest in her attention to details and her summations. "The Woman at the Washington Zoo" is best read as memoir celebrating a life fully lived and tragically cut short for her family. How do you live, knowing that you will die sooner than later and leave your two young children behind? This book is that answer.