Write Your Own Obituary!

by Kathi Diamant

Are you sensing a theme here? Several months ago I posted a blog, “How Not to Write an Obituary,” based on my experiences in writing my father’s obituary last November. Since then, I’ve written two more, one for my mother in March, and the latest, in August, for a dear friend, Glynn Bedington, who was, among other things, a wife and mother and a professional actor, director, producer…and writer. She died at age 61, of cancer. A few days after her death, I called Glynn’s husband, Paul, and asked him if he was getting any help in writing Glynn’s obit. Shyly, Paul responded that he had hoped I would write it. “After all,” he said,” after Glynn, you are the writer.”

I spent the next several days immersed in Glynn’s life, pouring over her family photographs, her 38-page Curriculum Vitae, her awards, letters and memorabilia that now represented for her six decades on earth. From a multitude of accomplishments and achievements, through conversations with her teenage daughters and husband, it was left to me to determine what was most important and meaningful, and I realized, again, that I was unequal to the task. The only person who could tell her story with ultimate clarity and truth was no longer with us.

As a biographer, I’ve encountered this problem before. A person’s life lays before you, in documents, files, and a mass of papers that provide the known facts. But the meaning of those facts is truly known only to the person who lived them.

Glynn was a good writer and author, with two published books and several professional articles, but not a single page, as far as I could tell, about her own life, in her own words.

When we think about our own death, which probably isn’t often for most of us, I imagine we all want to be remembered. In writing. We assume someone will write an obituary for us. But who? Will they know you, like you do? Does anyone? Of course not.

There's something else to think about. The exorbitant cost of placing an obit in a major daily newspaper has led to a new phenomenon: the lengthy online obituary. Once only the famous rated a 1,000 word piece (most newspaper obits run between 60-300 words) but now you, too, can have a mini-biography published, online. With so much more than the “who, what, where and when” possible, it’s more important than ever to think about this now, rather than when it too late. And we never know when that day will come.

My solution is that everyone writes their own obituary. No one else will do it like you can, especially if you are a writer. After all, this is your story. Who’s better than you?

Do it now. Open a notebook. Start with your name as you would like it to appear. Add in your parents’ names, and where you lived. Mention the important people and places, the accomplishments in each period of your life that meant the most to you, that molded and made you the person you have became. Have fun with it. Remember: you are alive, and your story isn’t over. Just write as much as you have lived so far. If you want to write an ending, imagine the most ideal circumstance. For example: “She died painlessly and at peace, surrounded by loving friends and family, after finally seeing the green flash at sunset on her 108th birthday” or whatever your best case scenario is.

Add to your notebook over the years, noting the lessons learned and the love engendered. And then, when your time comes, you can die at peace in the knowledge that your obituary will serve those who come after you, to know and appreciate the person you truly are.


Kathi Diamant is the award-winning author of “Kafka’s Last Love: The Mystery of Dora Diamant” (“Best of the Best Geisel Award, San Diego Book Awards) published by Basic Books in 2003. “Kafka’s Last Love” has been critically reviewed in more than 60 publications, and translated into French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and will soon appear in Germany and Brazil. As director of the Kafka Project at SDSU since 1998, she has led the international search for a lost literary treasure, and this summer will be leading a “Magical Mystery Literary History Tour" to Prague, Krakow and Berlin. For more information, visit www.kafkaproject.com

YOU ARE NOT ALONE

by Kathi Diamant

Writing can be a lonely business, a solitary endeavor, requiring isolation and intense focus. It demands time and a quiet environment, with long periods of uninterrupted concentration. I find that if I so much as go out to lunch, my whole writing day is shot. To write well, I have to be alone.

My favorite writer, Franz Kafka once described his ideal writing situation as “an innermost room of a spacious locked cellar.” His food would be brought and left, far away from his room, outside the cellar’s outermost door. “The walk to my food, in my dressing gown, through the vaulted cellars would be my only exercise. I would then return to my desk, eat slowly and with deliberation, then start writing again at once. And how I would write! From what depths I would drag it up! Without effort! For extreme concentration knows no effort.”

Kafka also said that “the existence of the writer is truly dependent on his desk. If he wants to escape madness, he really should never leave his desk. He must cling to it with his teeth.” But even Kafka feared that the solitude he forced on himself in order to write was depressing him, driving him mad, while writing was his only weapon to fight it.

So what’s a writer to do? Join a writing group, or start your own writing community. You will discover you are not alone, others have walked this path before you, and have experienced loneliness and isolation, and found solutions. In a writing group, you will find encouragement, support and inspiration. A writing group can make all the difference between success and failure, between giving up in despair and holding the first copy of your new book in your hands.

I’m a firm believer. I have been a member of Writing Women since 1988, and credit WW for my book, Kafka’s Last Love, which would not have been possible without their sage advice and unqualified encouragement. San Diego Writing Women, who produces this blog, is an offshoot of that group. And I just joined She Writes (also open to men), the largest community of women writers online.

There are many ways to get started with a group. In San Diego, author and writing teacher Judy Reeves runs ongoing writing groups, and there are Meet Ups for writers all over the country. If you want more information on how to start your own group, drop me a line—I’ll be happy to share guidelines and SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) for writing groups large and small.

As Kafka also said, “You won’t do anything without others.”

20 Reasons to Read My Book

By Kathi Diamant

If you attended our San Diego Writing Women Launch party on February 19, I don't have to tell you how fabulous it was: a brilliant crowd with standing room only, wonderful food and wines, outstanding music and fascinating discussions and presentations. Each of our nine writers had five minutes to share our books, and we chose different ways: some read from their book's chapters or preface, others spoke about the process.

I came up with "20 Reasons to Buy My Book." Since I only had 15 seconds per reason, I didn't get all the way through. So if you were there, here is the complete list, and if you weren't, here's how I filled my five minutes.

1. My book (Kafka's Last Love) is about Franz Kafka, one of the most influential writers in the world. His name or his adjective is invoked 75 times a day on the world wide web, and according to his bibliography, there's been a new book on Kafka published somewhere in the world every ten days for the past fourteen years. Of all the authors in all the world, only Shakespeare generates more PhDs, more biographies, more coffee-table books, and more tchachkes and trinkets than Kafka.

2. None of the Kafka biographies before my book’s publication and all of the biographies published since and from here on will have information that was discovered for and included in this book.

3. Kafka’s Last Love offers a fresh view of Franz Kafka. Long seen as a tormented and tortured individual, Kafka is seen through the eyes of his lover, Dora Diamant. We discover that Kafka was profound, joyous and inspirational.

4. Partially due to this new image of Kafka, expressed by Dora in this book, new publications of his work are abandoning the dark somber covers in exchange for brightly covered, playful jacket designs.

5. This book is the personal viewpoint of a wide expanse of history. Including, the rise of Communism, socialist Germany, the rise and fall of the third Reich, life in wartime Britain and the creation of Israel.

6. This book is about Dora Diamant, Kafka’s Last love. Several biographies have been written about his other love interests, Felice Bauer and Milena Jesenska. This is the first and so far, only book dealing with Dora’s life.

7. It is precisely because of Kafka’s love for Dora and his decision to live his last months with her that we are able to obtain this new view of Kafka. It’s a great, world class love story. Read it here.

8. If Dora is mentioned at all in other Kafka biographies, her involvement ends with (spoiler alert) Kafka’s death. This is the only book that examines Dora’s early life and solves the mystery of what became of her after Kafka’s passing.

9. There is currently convoluted legal trial going on in Israel involving the fate of various Kafka related documents currently in the hands of the descendants of Max Brod, Kafka’s friend, and publisher. The nature of those papers and documents, are found in this book.

10. Because of my book and its growing influence, I have been quoted as an expert last year in articles about Kafka in Time Magazine, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Washington Post and in numerous European publications.

11. Kafka’s Last Love contains the only English translation of an eye-witness account of (spoiler alert) Kafka’s death.

12. Kafka has been described as one of the most profoundly misunderstood writers of the 20th century. We can clear that up right now. Buy this book.

13. As a woman, you should buy this book. It is about a woman who kept her head above water in the great tides that swept the world in the last century. If you are a man, so was Kafka, and women loved him.

14. This book also contains the tragic story of Dora’s child Marianne Lask. Although biologically impossible by several years, she came to be known as Kafka’s daughter. A two for one offer. Read it here.

15. My book will make you want to read Kafka, and reading Kafka Makes You Smarter. It’s been scientifically proven. Studies conducted in 2009 by UC Santa Barbara and University of British Columbia showed that reading Kafka can make the brain work better and improve cognitive skills.

16. In this book you will read about the beginnings of the Kafka Project, the search for the missing papers of Franz Kafka. Originally thought to have been burned, instead Dora kept them secretly hidden they were confiscated by the Nazis when they looted the apartment of Dora and her husband, a publisher of underground Communist literature.

17. By reading this book you may be inspired to join the next Kafka Project Literary History tour, to Prague, Krakow and Berlin, currently scheduled for 2012.

18, There’s a strong thread of magic, metaphysics and mysticism surrounding Kafka and Dora. Those who study Kafka often write that that coincidences abound, and downright miracles occur.

19. Kafka’s aphorisms, which preface every chapter, are nuggets of wisdom and truth that you can use in your daily life. As long as you keep climbing there will be stairs…. Begin to see who you are instead of calculating what is to become of you.

20. This book, although extensively researched and footnoted, was written as a novel and is a damn good read.

Kathi Diamant left a career in broadcasting in 1990 to follow her dream to tell the story of Kafka’s last love. She retraced Dora’s life, interviewing all who knew her, uncovering lost letters in London, secret Nazi and Communist files in Berlin and Moscow, finding Dora’s missing diary in Paris , and reuniting her lost family in Tel Aviv. Kathi’s literary detective work resulted in KAFKA'S LAST LOVE: THE MYSTERY OF DORA DIAMANT, which won the San Diego Book Awards’ “Best Biography” and "Best of the Best" in 2004. It is translated into French, Spanish, Russian, and soon in Chinese, Portuguese and German.