Q&A with Karen Malpede

 

Photo by Salem Krieger

 

 

 

Karen Malpede is the author of the new memoir Last Radiance: Radical Lives, Bright Deaths. She is also the author/director of 22 plays and is the co-founder of Theater Three Collaborative. She is based in New York.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Last Radiance?

 

A: My husband’s illness and death. I realized how my creative and personal life has been marked and somewhat determined by cancer. George [Bartenieff] was my creative partner for 35 years. He was my husband. He was my muse. I wrote 10 plays in which he starred, for which he won OBIE awards for acting and which we toured.

 

He was an amazing person, charming, funny, brilliant, warm, and he was capable of astonishing transformations on the stage. At the end of my play, Other Than We, he turned into an owl in full view of the audience and seemed to take flight. His stage and screen performances are unforgettable.

 

When George died in 2022, I knew I needed to tell his story and my story. The story of how we met in the downtown, libertine avant-garde arts scene of the 1970s and ‘80s; the story of the amazing people we knew and worked with.

 

Many cultural icons walk through the pages of this book: Allen Ginsberg, Noam Chomsky, Grace Paley, Judith Malina, Julian Beck, Barbara Deming, Andrea Dworkin, and world-renowned younger artists like Basil Twist and Anohni. Our friends and colleagues.

 

Q: I’m so sorry for your loss…

 

How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: The people I focus on, whose cancer deaths impacted me, first my father, then Julian Beck, Barbara Deming, and George, shone with an inner light that intensified as they came closer to their deaths.

 

My father was a troubled man, but the others were pacifist, activist-artists. They were radiant in their lives and in their art. They beamed love on their families and friends.

 

Each one of them kept working—acting, writing, even protesting—until the moment they died. Each of them made conscious decisions about how they wished to die, and each of them died in community, surrounded by the love of family, friends and colleagues.

 

Last Radiance: Radical Lives, Bright Deaths refers to that light that emanated from them, an inner light that comes from doing what one loves and giving to others with love. 

 

Q: The author Greg Grandin called the book a “bracing and true book that teaches us new ways to be alive.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: What Greg understands so perfectly (his full quote is inside the book’s cover) is that by facing what many people and many people in the medical profession run from—death—we also gain a new appreciation of love, and, yes, we become more alive to all the mysteries of life.

 

Greg also writes: “Illness is a metaphor for our anguished world, as Karen Malpede’s harrowing and haunting, but also joyful, Last Radiance makes clear.”

 

There is plenty of joy, also humor, and sex in the book.

 

Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?

 

A: By writing these stories, I hope to give others the courage to be present at the deaths of their beloveds. Cancer is an epidemic. One in three Americans will have cancer in their lifetimes. All of us are impacted by cancer.

 

The book tells the stories of how good lives lead to good deaths. I want readers to know that seeing one’s loved ones out of this world is a privilege and a gift. I want to demystify dying, by showing its mysteries.

 

For me, writing this book was an act of love. But there is also a chapter on grief, including my psilocybin-induced trip to the underworld. Grief is love and we grieve according to how deeply we have loved.

 

I wanted, also, by documenting the extremity of my grief to show that grief, too, must be fully experienced—in order to honor our love and to carry it with us, as memory, now, but still as a sustaining force. Illness, death, grief, sex, artistic genius and how these intertwine, this is the substance of the book. I want readers to be deeply moved and to become braver by reading it.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I put on hold a commission for a play from City Garage Theater in Santa Monica, which has also staged my play Us. I am three years behind.

 

The director of the theater, Frederique Michel, is French, demanding and fearless. She asked me to write a play about human trafficking of young people. I didn’t think I could do it, but, now, of course, I am conceptualizing a play I call The Epstein Files, in which I will present an answer to the mysterious life of Jeffrey Epstein through the lens of young women he abused. I expect it to be quite explosive and ultimately healing.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Write what frightens you. Make what the French mystic philosopher Simone Weil called “the supreme effort.” She said, “Writing is like giving birth. I have no fear of not making the supreme effort as long as I am honest with myself and that I pay attention.” I had her words pasted above my desk for years.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb