I’m reading a book of short stories by George Saunders. The librarian that checked it out for me waxed effusive about Saunders. His stories are good, although they fall short of another book of short stories I just finished by Ottessa Moshfegh.

I picked up Moshfegh’s book because I got a Google alert and discovered something she shared about Mark in an interview for Vulture, including one of his 50-books-in-a-year as one of 10 works she’d take with her to a desert island. I’d never read anything by her. She was in his MFA cohort at Brown:

We lost this brave genius last year, and the books he gifted us while he lived are so wonderfully strange and honest and beautiful, I can’t believe he even existed. He was more than a poet or performance artist — Baumer’s life itself was a work of art. He was truly radical, and the most openhearted, unjaded human I’ve ever met.

That was kind of her.

Reading short stories.

Someone who had been a central figure in my life during a formative time once sent me an email about Saunders and something he’d read about him, somewhere, how he’d unpacked some failure of kindness from high school decades earlier, about someone he called “ELLEN.” He got himself all worked up into a tornado, effusing regret that he’d been unkind to a high school classmate and “Saunders’ advice” struck a chord with him. Interestingly, as I’ve been mired in the muck of grief and loss, he’s not been able to muster anything beyond a letter that I “guilted” him to write weeks after Mark was killed.

People are unforgiving about others and yet, we’re all miserable failures when it comes to supporting one another most of the time. I know this all-too-well.

Words uttered without subsequent actions mean absolutely nothing.