Annie Dillard

1945-2026

Somewhere in the archives of our family photos is a shot of my brother and me when we were quite young (four and six?) playing in the snow with a couple of girls.  One, the girl my age, was Amy Doak.  I got to know her a little when we got older and started to go to boy-girl parties, but she had no interest in me and soon got snatched up by an older guy.  Her sister, who was a year older than my brother, was named Annie, or maybe we called her just Ann.  I don’t actually remember playing with the Doak girls, just hearing the family say that my brother and I did that when we lived on Bucknell Street, and they lived nearby.  I don’t blame myself for not remembering.  It was 74 years ago.

The next thing I heard about Annie—except for the kinds of rumors you hear about older teenagers—was that her name was now Dillard, and at the age of 28 she had published a hugely successful, Pulitzer Prize winning book entitled Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

My first reaction, I’m sure, was envy.  I had written dozens of stories by 1974, none of which had been published, and was engaged in writing a novel, waking up every morning at 4:50 and writing for ninety minutes before I went off to my job teaching English at a secondary school.  The novel also didn’t get published.  You might think I’d be a big-enough person to put such feelings aside and read the book, even if I didn’t remember playing in the snow with her.  Just from the standpoint of curiosity: wouldn’t I want to read the words of a Point Breeze[1] girl who had made the big time?  But I wasn’t a big enough person.  I was petty and ambitious and envious.  I didn’t want to read the spiritual ruminations of a woman about a creek (or as we said in Pittsburgh, a crick).  I wanted to read fiction.

What nobody seems to mention about this deeply spiritual person is that she apparently had an affair with her creative writing teacher.  She married him at the end of her sophomore year, and I don’t think he chastely proposed before they had ever touched each other (especially not if those rumors Stan Hahn told me were true).  They were together for ten years and then amicably divorced.  But marrying your creative writing teacher is a good career move.[2]

I vaguely followed Annie’s career without reading her books.  I did eventually find some success, and in 1985, when I published my third novel, Second Brother, I got a call on my landline, all we had in those days.  The voice at the other end said, “David, this is Annie Dillard.”  A rather startling moment.  She said that when she saw the book reviewed in the New York Times, she said to herself, “Is that our David Guy?” and of course it sounded that way, from the description of the book.  She didn’t say she liked or didn’t like the book.  But she told me that she was about to publish a memoir, and our books took place in the same neighborhood, on the same streets, at the same schools, with the same people.  It was uncanny.

Annie was a famous person by then.  But she wasn’t petty like me.  She was happy that a Point Breeze boy had made good.

By that time I was reviewing books for a number of papers, including USA Today (an editor from the Washington Post had taken a job at that paper, and turned the Friday book page into the best part of it; I never missed it), and when An American Childhood came out, the editor asked if I’d like to review it.  I explained that I had once played in the snow with the author, also received a phone call from her, but he didn’t think those things disqualified me, and I had the same reaction reading her book that she had reading mine: the incidents were different, but this was my life.  This was my place and these were my people.

Annie didn’t know the real connection.  In writing Second Brother I had moved residences around so as not to identify people, but the character named Sam Golden in that book was based on my friend Stan Hahn, and Annie’s best friend at Ellis School was Stan’s sister, who is a prominent character in her book.  We didn’t share best friends, but our best friends were in the same memorable family.

Years later, I taught at Duke for a semester, and while I was there a couple of Virginia writers came to visit, Richard Bausch and George Garrett.  They were a traveling road show of anecdotes about writers and writing, both excellent writers themselves, and I was told to have them visit my class, also urge my students to attend an evening program they gave.  I attended myself, and afterwards, outside, who did I see but Annie Dillard.  She was quite recognizable, standing there on a balmy Durham night.  I introduced myself, and she said, “Well.  I haven’t seen you for what, fifty years,” and we had a brief conversation.  Apparently she had a house in Hillsborough for a while[3], so that was how she happened to be in the area.  Those writers may also have had a Hollins connection.

I was surprised by several things in her obituary.  One of her students referred to her as a chain smoker, which didn’t square with her Thoreauvian image.  Another odd detail was that, after spending the day observing Pilgrim Creek, she went home at night to a suburban house.  She didn’t build a cabin beside her Walden Pond.

But I have to say that, reading about her career as a whole, and having myself changed in the ensuing years, I now am interested in her writing.  (I often feel that way when a writer dies.)  She doesn’t sound like a theologian, as some journalist or other described her, but as a spiritual seekers (a term I dislike, though I don’t know of a better one) who studied the literature of the world and all the great traditions, looking for answers to the big questions.  In that way she is like Emerson and Thoreau.  And although people accused her (no less an eminence than Eudora Welty, who apparently reviewed Tinker Creek) of being only interested in herself, I think she was seeing the world through herself, as Whitman did, and Thoreau, and various other solitaries through the years.  It’s an honorable tradition, and one that interests me.

Even the words that the Times quoted to explain the rather long silence at the end of her life didn’t tell the whole story.  It quoted her as saying, “I can no longer travel, can’t meet with strangers, can’t sign books but will sign labels with SASE, can’t write by request, and can’t answer letters.”  They didn’t quote the end of that paragraph, which strikes a completely different tone.  “I’ve got to read and concentrate.  Why?  Beats me.”

It’s what she’d been doing all her life, and she wanted to end in silence.  She had every right to do that.  I can’t help wondering if she was keeping journals.

I’m sorry to have lost an important writer, and yet another friend from Point Breeze.

[1] That was the name of our Pittsburgh neighborhood.  It’s never made much sense to me.

[2] People frown on such behavior these days, but back then it was fairly common for students to have affairs with professors.  I wasn’t especially well-connected but knew five or six people who had.  My own creative writing teacher, Reynolds Price, had an affair with a guy in my class.

[3] I discovered this detail from Robert Baird, who knew Annie in her later years, and wrote a superb reminiscence of her in the New Yorker.  https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/annie-dillards-subject-was-the-whole-world#rid=59e1e352-a045-47b8-b015-1256cf857df3&q=annie+dillard