THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022 45things.” Day once told me he’d spent
much of his life documenting Ameri-
can imperialism because “nobody in the
family had ever told me any family his-
tory. So I decided, I’m going to write a
history that Americans don’t know and
may not want told.” “Family Laundry”
was the history his family had not
wanted told: among other secrets, the
hero unearths his mother’s infidelities
and his drunken father’s fatal passivity.
A few drafts in, I persuaded Day to
shift from the third person to the first.
Though he had named his protagonist
Randy (in tribute, I suspect, to his own
libido), the story was plainly his own:
I admit that I did not love my father as
much as I should have. How much was that?
More than I did anyway. How much could I
have loved him? Infinitely more. Oh, sure, I
answer myself, but you are not a saint, and your
capacities are strictly finite, and maybe your
ability to love is meagre, whatever the reasons.
Randy’s feelings made for painful
reading. Yet the book struck me as a his-
torian’s novel, animated less by emotional
imperatives than by cultural tides. After
the main female character kills herself,
Randy blames it on Calvinism and win-
ner-take-all capitalism: “I am offering
the notion that Barbara Quick is the vic-
tim of bad Protestant theology from the
sixteenth century and impossible social
teleology from the twentieth.”
When “Family Laundry” was pub-
lished, in 1986, reviewers were more gen-
erous. (The Times wrote that “Mr. Friend
has conducted a difficult inquiry with
energy, sensitivity and determination.”)
After reading his appraisals, Day smil-
ingly told me, “I think it possible, with
a few more novels, that I may carve out
a minor place in American letters.”
He wrote three more novels before
Mom got cancer. The first was a saga
about Indonesia, the second a choleric
take on Swarthmore College, and the
third, “The Deerlover,” an anatomiza-
tion of a suburban man who yearns for
more. None found a publisher.
When Day asked me to read “The
Deerlover,” I was mad that he’d never
said a word to me after a wrenching
breakup a few months earlier. I also felt
that his fiction was too seemly—that it
lacked any wild rumpus. I didn’t soften
the blow much in my editorial note; the
obligatory “There’s a lot of good stuff
here” sentence was just that, a sentence,
even though he’d often told me, “A writer
needs recognition of his achievement,”
and, “Always compliment what’s good,
and recognize the effort involved.”
From Warsaw, Day wrote Mom that
he’d dreamed about the seven rejections
“The Deerlover” had received: “I awoke
demoralized. Will I ever be a writer?”
In his journals, he confided, “I appear
to myself as verbose, shallow, over-
ambitious, vain; either unsophisticated
or oversophisticated. I have the feeling
that my own writing has left me mul-
tiply wounded, devastated.”I
used to think that my job as a writer
was to convey facts, description, a few
bars of color, and a verdict. I gradually
realized that how I responded to what
I was writing about, how it made me
feel, wasn’t beside the point. And, in my
forties, I discovered that I was chipping
away at a recurrent subject. Most of my
best pieces were about people who, even
at the summit of their success, felt that
they’d failed. Triumph—rare, lucky, dull,
and brief—is an artifact of editing: fail-
ure, failure, failure, failure, a moment of
jubilation, and the story ends. If it con-
tinued, you’d see all the failure that fol-
lowed. After the “Miracle on Ice” U.S.
hockey team won the Olympic gold
medal, in 1980, only five of its twenty
players had long careers in the N.H.L.
In 2004, I wrote a Profile of Harold
Ramis, the writer-director of “Caddy-
shack” and “Groundhog Day.” Thoughrevered in the comedy world, Ramis
saw himself as “a benevolent hack.”
“Much as I want to be a protagonist, it
doesn’t happen, somehow,” he told me.
“I’m missing some tragic element or
some charisma, or something.”
He believed that his comedic part-
ner, Bill Murray, had what he lacked.
“One of my favorite Bill Murray stories
is one about when he went to Bali,”
Ramis said. “I’d spent three weeks there,
mostly in the south, where the touristsare. But Bill rode a motorcycle into the
interior until the sun went down and
got totally lost. He goes into a village
store, where they are very surprised
to see an American tourist, and starts
talking to them in English, going, ‘Wow!
Nice hat! Hey, gimme that hat!’” R a -
mis’s eyes lit up. “He ended up doing a
dumb show with the whole village sit-
ting around laughing as he grabbed the
women and tickled the kids. No worry
about getting back to a hotel, no need
for language, just his presence, and his
charisma, and his courage. When you
meet the hero, you sure know it.”
I also spent some time with Stanley
Donen, who directed “Funny Face” and
co-directed “On the Town” and “Singin’
in the Rain.” When he talked about his
place in the firmament, at age seventy-
eight, he began to choke up. “Here it
is,” he was finally able to say. “As an art-
ist, I aspire to be as remarkable as Leon-
ardo da Vinci. To be fantastic, aston-
ishing, one of a kind. I will never get
there. He’s the one who stopped time.
I just did ‘Singin’ in the Rain.’ It’s pretty
good, yes. It’s better than most, I know.
But it still leaves you reaching up.”I
was Day’s first reader, but he was not
mine. Only when I wrote about Mom
for this magazine, in 2006, did I ask him
to read something before I published
it. Day’s note was complimentary. (His
therapist had warned him, “Do not enter
into competition with Tad, nor conform
to his casting of your character.”)
I’d set out to write about how you
could grasp Mom’s emotional history
from the intricate arrangements of her
house—particularly the eleven photos of
her elusive father in her dressing room—
but the piece grew into a larger portrait
of her warmth and her wit, as well as her
inconsolability. After she died, I’d found
a poem on her computer, which ended:That night, waiting for sleep, I whisper,
I did only trivial things today.
And he asks, Why aren’t you painting?A week after the piece appeared, the
family gathered in Villanova for Christ-
mas. A rash on Day’s face had prevented
him from shaving for five weeks, so he
looked unkempt. At dinner, he gloom-
ily announced that his remaining life
span had been “allotted by the actuar-
ies at the I.R.S. as nine years.” Then he