'Zoo' offers company of a Washington insider

Karen Algeo Krizman, Special to the News

Published November 11, 2005 at midnight

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The Woman at the Washington Zoo pays fitting tribute to journalist Marjorie Williams. A writer for The Washington Post, Vanity Fair and Slate magazine, Williams died in January at the age of 47. In an "act of mourning," her husband, Timothy Noah, has compiled a collection of her political profiles, and musings on family and fate.

In this case, fate dealt Williams a devastating blow.

The 2001 discovery of a mysterious lump in her abdomen turned out to be advanced liver cancer. The mother of an 8-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter, Williams was given only a few months to live but beat the odds and survived another 3 1/2 years.

A handful of essays about her fight against cancer are included in the final section of this book. Although poignant, one gets the feeling that Williams didn't have the time - or the desire - for sympathy.

"I live at least two different lives," Williams wrote in "Hit by Lightning: Cancer Memoir," which makes its debut in this book. "In the background, usually, is the knowledge that for all my good fortune so far, I will still die of this disease. This is where I wage the physical fight, which is, to say at the least, a deeply unpleasant process. And, beyond the concrete challenges of needles and mouth sores and barf basins and barium, it has thrown me on a roller coaster that sometimes clatters up a hill, giving me a more hopeful, more distant view than I'd expected, and at other times plunges faster than I think I can endure. Even when you know the plunge is coming . . . even then, it comes with some element of fresh despair.

"I've hated roller coasters all my life.

"But in the foreground is regular existence: love the kids, buy them new shoes, enjoy their burgeoning wit; get some writing done, plan vacations with Tim, have coffee with my friends. Having found myself faced with that old bull-session question (What would you do if you found out you had a year to live?), I learned that a woman with children has the privilege or duty of bypassing the existential. What you do, if you have little kids, is lead as normal a life as possible, only with more pancakes."

This matter-of-fact approach is evident throughout Williams' writing. She was never one to mince words, as witnessed in "Real Complicated," an essay about the launch of a new magazine published in March 2000.

Real Simple was billed as a "magazine for a simpler life/home/body/ soul." But Williams offered a wry take on its ad campaign.

"Stressed out women of America, the secret can now be told: The key to a simple life is to have invisible children," she wrote. "Even though Real Simple expects that about 70 percent of its thirty-something target audience will be mothers, its debut issue pictures not a single child, except in its advertisements.

"If you're going to peddle a fantasy, why not go all the way? No sticky fingers, no sweaters dropped on the floor, no cracker crumbs ground into the sofa. Presto: serenity."

Besides saying what was on her mind, Williams also wasn't afraid to confront tough issues. For instance, a 1998 column takes feminists to tasks for failing to hold President Clinton's feet to the fire for his sexual escapades.

"Where America's women leaders have failed is in their unwillingness to draw even the most common-sensical conclusions from the evidence of Clinton's recklessness," wrote Williams, herself a self-proclaimed feminist. "Instead, they have taken refuge in legalisms. In the words of an 'alert' posted on the feminist Women Leaders Online Web site, 'Men acting like pigs is not against the law; if it were, many women in America would be zillionaires.'

"But since when did feminists see their mission as defining and denouncing only that which is illegal? Didn't the phrase 'men acting like pigs' once describe a fair portion of what feminists were trying to change? . . . In their sudden and exclusive reverence for the law, feminists have jeopardized some of their greatest achievements."

A master at capturing human spirit and character in print, some of Williams' best political profiles are included here. One particularly insightful and provocative piece is "Scenes from a Marriage," a dissection of the disintegration of the Clinton and Gore relationship.

When the profile ran in the July 2001 edition of Vanity Fair, Williams proclaimed the pair's breakup as "complete."

"The two men had not spoken since the day of Bush's inauguration," she wrote.

She then went on to portray the relationship between Clinton and his vice president as doomed from the start. The president was the undisciplined, gregarious "alpha dog" with a notorious temper, she wrote, while Gore was the quiet, controlled "younger brother" who kept Clinton in check while yearning to feel "needed, valued and respected."

Their differences often led to disagreements, but as Williams wrote: "Gore's frustration had their pale mirror image on Clinton's side of the house. Most sources I questioned insist that Clinton's grudges were shorter- lived than Gore's; Clinton is a more elastic, more forgiving soul than Gore. . . . But there were limits on (Clinton's ) side, too. Sometimes he chafed under the relentlessness of Gore's help. 'I never saw resentment on Clinton's part,' says a key former staffer. 'What I saw more was 'When is this guy just going to leave me alone? Give me a break!' "

At first glance, the appeal of The Woman at the Washington Zoo seems limited to those who were familiar with Williams before her death. But readers who are simply looking for great writing won't be disappointed.

As her husband writes in the introduction, "The insight and effervescence and sweet sadness and tart humor of Marjorie's words will always keep part of her alive. The mere fact that you never knew her and loved her as I did is no reason to deny you the intense pleasure of her company."

Karen Algeo Krizman is a freelance writer living in Littleton.

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