Page 1 of On Fire Island

prologue

In ancient Hebrew, the word fortomband the word forwombare one and the same. This is what the Rabbi (and bestselling author) I met at the Random House Christmas party pointed out to me when I told her I was dying.

“We are born twice,” she assured me. “Once from the womb and once from the tomb.”

It may have been wrong of me to bring up such a somber subject at such a festive occasion, but she was a rabbi at a Christmas party, and I was curious about her views on the afterlife. Besides, I was confident, after my recent diagnosis, that I would not be seeing her again. Though I was wrong about that. She visited me weekly in the months before my death and even officiated at my big send-off.

I am not one to believe anything that I cannot see with my own two eyes.

“Julia is a skeptic,” my father would often say, a trait that was evident since I attended my first magic show—my sister’s eyes were wide with awe, mine were narrow with doubt. But theRabbi, or possibly desperation, made me a believer. And I left this world, after just thirty-seven years in it, convinced I would be heading toward another.

Between the two worlds, it turned out, there was one last summer... on Fire Island.

Part One

What a lovely place this is; it’s got water all around it.

—MARILYN MONROE,

when first visiting her acting coach, Lee Strasberg, on FireIsland

one

Fire Island

No one is quite sure why the narrow, thirty-two-mile barrier beach off the coast of Long Island is called Fire Island, but there is much conjecture on the topic. Many believe the name is tied to its origins—a violent winter storm in 1690 that broke through the mainland of Long Island, creating four separate inlets. The Dutch word forfour(vier) is pronounced somewhat like fire, so that mispronunciation may be responsible. I tend to prefer the version that states the name is derived from the fires that pirates set on its shores to lure unsuspecting ships onto the great sandbar before looting and pillaging everyone and everything on board. Although I am a pacifist, that version is considerably more interesting to me than a Dutch typo.

The backstory of the island’s name, as intriguing as it is, is eclipsed by the astonishing history of its many waves of inhabitants. What began with Native Americans, pirates, and moonshiners eventually gave way to a rapid succession of authors, actors, communists, artists, and an entire enclave of LGBTQ+ vacationers.

As a lover of the written word, I am most taken with the list of authors who’ve roamed its shores. Legendary scribes, fromTruman Capote to Tennessee Williams, spent time on Fire Island, if not writing, I would imagine, at least thinking—which, as an editor, I know is half the battle. The poet Frank O’Hara was struck and killed by a dune buggy on its beaches in 1966, a notable distinction on a virtually car-free island. Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner are said to have drummed up the premise for their infamous comedy sketch, “The 2000 Year Old Man,” as teenagers there in the 1940s. And a decade later, Arthur Miller played softball on the field right across from my house, while his wife, Marilyn Monroe, sat in the stands.

It was in that house across from the ball field, ten wonderful years ago, that the love of my life, author and sportswriter, Benjamin Morse, got down on one knee and presented me with an advance copy of his second novel, opened to the dedication. It read:

I love you, Julia. Marry me?

I said yes.

Ben and I had our first kiss on Fire Island the summer before he proposed, and we knew instantly that it was “our” place. It’s a common phenomenon. People need to be romantics to fall in love with a narrow strip of land that could be washed away by one big wave, and where their only mode of transportation is a bicycle or their own two feet.

At first glance, Ben and I make an odd couple. We undeniably call to mind Beauty and the Beast: me, petite, with dark shiny hair and my button nose perpetually buried in a book, and him, with his clunky towering frame, unruly locks and moody, brooding demeanor. Though I always found him to be sexy—sexy like an unmade bed. Intellectually, on the other hand, we are completely in tune and have an uncanny ability to finish each other’ssentences—not surprising since for most of our marriage I was also his editor.

The decision for us to collaborate wasn’t so much a choice on either of our parts as a natural progression. It began with an author passing pages to their spouse—a common occurrence even when publishing is not the family business—and grew from there. A year into our marriage, when Ben’s editor hinted at retirement, the writing was quite literally on the page. His publisher agreed to assign someone else to deal with the financial components of the job and I came on board to fill the rest of the role. I had been looking to make a move for a while, and it was very exciting for both of us. Plus, as far as my career went, Ben had always felt like the one who got away. Even with two of my authors on the bestseller list at the time and one a Booker Prize winner, adding Ben to my list felt like a crowning achievement.

When I first heard the name Ben Morse, I was technically a newbie. I say technically because while I had only been in publishing for a year and a half at the time, I had considered myself an editor of sorts since the ninth grade when Ellen Crown’s mother (an editor at Alfred Knopf) spoke on career day. By the time she was halfway through with her presentation, I was all in, and my intention never swayed.

I immersed myself in the classics, writing tiny notes in the page margins and highlighting character traits, conflicts, and points-of-view. While the other girls were obsessing overTitanic’s Jack and Rose, I went to sleep dreaming of Cathy and Heathcliff or Elizabeth Bennet and Mr.Darcy. I got a greater high poring over my friends’ English assignments than smoking a blunt with them in Sheep Meadow. And nothing thrilled me more than a prompt with a small word count. To me, editing felt like the best kind of puzzle.

My first real job, after graduating summa cum laude with a degree in English from Sarah Lawrence College, was at Sopher-Grace, a midsize publishing house run by a sexist tyrant. The narrow-minded managing editor, who inserted the fact that he was a Yale man into nearly every conversation, had a huge ego with little taste or talent to back it up. While others found him a charming throwback to aMad Men–like, three-martini-lunch era of publishing, I found him pompous, misogynistic, and, in fact, not a very good editor—and he knew it. He also knew that firing me without cause would land him in hot water with HR, so he tried other tactics, like tasking me with reading a 120,000-word dramatic tome written by a sportswriter from theDaily News, which no one else wanted to tackle.

“Any plans this weekend?” he had asked on a Friday afternoon, as I failed to slip by his open office door unnoticed.

“Nothing much,” I lied, not wanting to get personal and admit that I had a blind date courtesy of my nana Hannah, who had been pushing me to go out with her neighbor’s grandson, the Doctor, for months.

“Now you do,” he said, handing me a cumbersome box containing a double-sided copy of the aforementioned five-hundred-page sweeping saga spanning three generations of a poor Irish family.

I canceled my plans, dealt with Nana, who I was apparently “pushing to an early grave with my lack of interest in settling down,” and barely slept the entire weekend, and not because I wanted to impress my jerk of a boss—I couldn’t put the book down. I immediately fell in love with its protagonist and developed an instant fascination with its author.

My nana was incorrect in her analysis; I had an interest in settling down. It was just that all my crushes of late had been onfictional characters who instilled unrealistic expectations when it came to my real love life. I went to sleep that weekend dreaming of my nineteenth-century Irish lover and woke itching with an unyielding curiosity about the man who had created him.

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