This is NOT Nanette Vonnegut's ex-husband.

Nanette Vonnegut, daughter of Slaughterhouse Five author Kurt, wrote a letter to Harper's to correct a parenthetical assertion in the October "New Books" column that she was once married to mustachioed talk show host Geraldo Rivera. She was not, but her sister was.

"I HAVE NEVER, EVER REMOTELY BEEN MARRIED TO GERALDO RIVERA!" writes Ms. Vonnegut, who has been married to Scott Prior for 30 years.

However, it is easy to see the source of the confusion. Ms. Vonnegut's sister Edith was once married to Mr. Rivera "for about one minute." So it is easy to see how book reviewer Joshua Cohen could have gotten confused.

At any rate, Harper's notes that Ms. Vonnegut is correct. She was never married to Mr. Rivera. It regrets the error.

Full letter below:

FUBAR

In his New Books column [October], Joshua Cohen stated that I was once married to Geraldo Rivera. I HAVE NEVER, EVER REMOTELY BEEN MARRIED TO GERALDO RIVERA! I have been married to the same man, Scott Prior, for thirty years. In the grand scheme of things, my sister Edith was married to Geraldo for about one minute. She warned me that this rumor about Geraldo and me was afloat and said, “Tag, you’re it!”

Nanette Vonnegut
Northampton, Mass.

Editors’ note:
Nanette Vonnegut is correct. We regret the error.

Kurt Vonnegut. (Photo by Gil Friedberg / Pix Inc. / Time Life Pictures / Getty Images)

More than any writer of his era, Kurt Vonnegut survives as an image: haggard, mustachioed, nicotine-stained, his hair a tangle—a cat’s cradle, one might say—of curls. As was often noted, he looked like Mark Twain, only cuter. Certainly, he was more boyish than Twain. He was a millionaire who rued, until he died, that his mother had not been a better hugger; a grown man who went swimming, sheepishly, in pants; a father who “painted pertinent quotes on various walls in the house.” He was 6'3", but small at heart. “If the government assigned heights based on maturity,” he wrote in a letter to his first wife, Jane, “[I] would be much shorter.”

Vonnegut’s fiction was similarly deceptive; he addressed major themes in a minor key. “Mass destruction was a bit of a Vonnegut trope,” as Charles Shields observes in And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life (Henry Holt and Co., 528 pages, $30.00). That this was so is undeniable, and yet the message of Vonnegut’s darkest novels must sound saccharine to many schoolchildren. He believed in common decency and common sense, in mankind over machines. He was big on being nice. Being nasty was a bête noire. To the madness of his century, Vonnegut, who died in 2007, applied the moral vision of a Mouseketeer.

This made him a sympathetic public figure, who was quick to decry the religiosity of the Republican party and the war in Vietnam, but a novelist whose limitations were as conspicuous as his gifts. “There is an almost intolerable sentimentality in everything I write,” as Vonnegut himself admitted. In his greatest satires, Cat’s Cradle (1963) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), he envisioned catastrophic events from the perspective of their bystanders. This reflected a truth of his own experience. As an American prisoner of war in Dresden, in 1945, Vonnegut had hidden in an underground meat locker while Allied aircraft firebombed the city. When he emerged, “Lazarus-like,” days later, Dresden was a cinder. “It was as if he had slept through the sacking of Troy and woke just as the Greeks were boarding their ships for home,” as Mr. Shields puts it.

Vonnegut’s genius was to stake out this experience of anticlimax as his novelistic territory. His heroes are bemused bit players whose lives are measured by their distance from great affairs, rather than their proximity to them. It is a worldview inverted in favor of the little guy, and it is as hostile to change as it is to power. Mr. Shields is insightful when he points out that Vonnegut, though revered by hippies, was “less a radical than a reactionary.” On the day of the moon landing, in 1969, Vonnegut went on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, where he could rail against its profligacy in real-time. “For that kind of money,” Vonnegut had already written, paraphrasing a scientist, “the least [NASA] can do is discover God.” He had become the lord of the bumpkins. And indeed, with his frayed Afro and slight stoop, his invariable cigarette, Vonnegut looked the part.

It is surprising, then, to discover the degree to which this look and the persona that went with it were contrived. Mr. Shield’s biography of Vonnegut takes its title from Slaughterhouse-Five, where it occurs dozens of times; it is the perennial refrain of bad news. “He was arrested for plundering. He was tried and shot. So it goes.” The phrase encapsulates the attitude of wistful passivity that readers correctly associate with Vonnegut’s fiction. But it is an ironic title for the biography of the man himself, because Kurt Vonnegut the illustrious author was a strenuous work of artifice, whose fate was anything but thrust upon him. “We are what we pretend to be,” Vonnegut wrote in his third novel, Mother Night (1961), “so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” He was a scrupulous pretender who heeded his own advice.

Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922. He grew up in a milieu so mistrustful of art that, when it came time for him to go to college, he was compelled, against his wishes, to study chemistry. Yet he discovered his vocation early. Vonnegut wrote columns for his high school and college newspapers, and, after the war, in 1951, he quit a well-paid job in public relations at General Electric to pursue his fiction full-time. But he was already married and a father, and he continued, perforce, to supplement his income by less exalted means. He worked as a high school teacher, a creative writing instructor, a copywriter, a car salesman and a caption writer for Sports Illustrated, where his tenure was characteristically brief. “The horse jumped over the fucking fence,” Vonnegut wrote the day he walked out. He was rarely too proud to stoop to an opportunity, but often too proud to exploit one. “Maybe the problem was not that the agents didn’t know what to do for [Vonnegut],” the SI secretary, Carolyn Blakemore, later reflected, “but he didn’t know what to do in the role of a writer.”

Ms. Blakemore misjudged her colleague. One thing Vonnegut did do was rise at 5 every morning to write. And when his moment finally came, he seized it with an alacrity that is hard to distinguish, in Mr. Shields’s telling of the story, from opportunism.

As the publication date drew near for Slaughterhouse-Five, on which Vonnegut had worked, fitfully, for 20 years, he brooded over his author photo. He was clean-cut, clean-shaven, a bit paunchy—in 1969, an unlikely candidate for cultural eminence. He decided “to cultivate the style of an author who was in.” “To meet the expectations of his audience was key,” Mr. Shields writes. “He lost weight, allowed his close-cropped hair to become curly and tousled, and grew a moustache. … He looked like an avant-garde artist and social critic now, not rumpled Dad-in-a-cardigan.” His upper lip would never reappear. Slaughterhouse-Five became a number-one New York Times best-seller, and its tousled (not rumpled) author became an icon of the counterculture.

In retrospect, the acuity with which Vonnegut marketed himself seems to demonstrate an insight into his era that is close to cynicism about it. Mr. Shields’s thoroughgoing biography does little to dispel this impression. (Mr. Shields, in turn, can demonstrate a thoroughgoingness that is close to comedy. When he quotes from Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, he footnotes it, play, act, and scene.) Vonnegut became an idol to a demographic to which he personally remained aloof. He did not get hippies, and they, up close, did not get him. When he met with Jefferson Airplane to brainstorm lyrics, they could only apologize to each other. “As a friend wrote to [Vonnegut] sometime later, ‘Your writing has the peculiar quality of only reflecting the reader’s beliefs back on him.’”

Mr. Shields is a rather bland reader of his subject’s fiction. “The more autobiographical his work became,” he observes, “the less space he devoted to fiction.” Still, he has a nose for its author’s contradictions. The sentimental old man of American letters could be a cold fish in the flesh. A holder of rousing political opinions, Vonnegut “had only been mildly interested in politics most of his adult life”—until he realized that “his audience expected him … to moralize.” A salty Midwesterner, he fed “at the trough of celebrity up to his ears.” A stormy foe of the Vietnam war, he was also a stockholder in “Dow Chemical, the sole maker of napalm.”

And Vonnegut, who championed family to his readers, was reckless with those closest to him. “The persona, the ‘ghost’ of him, as he called it, became like an itching, second skin he couldn’t slough off,” as Mr. Shields writes. In 1972, while living in Manhattan with the photographer Jill Krementz, whom he married in 1979—“I taught Kurt to play tennis and to make love”—he asked his estranged first wife to file his taxes. “That would give him more time to write.” He spurned the agent, Knox Burger, to whom he owed his career, and the publisher, Sam Lawrence, to whom he owed its resurrection. When critics, after Slaughterhouse-Five, began to pan his novels, “he charged [them] with one of his favorite accusations: they were just snobs.” Still, he “badly … wanted to teach at Harvard.”

“Perhaps it was possible to live too long,” writes his biographer. Vonnegut aged ungracefully. His writing declined, his relationship with Ms. Krementz staled—to his children, he referred to their marriage as “his disease”—and, in 1984, he attempted suicide. “I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all,” Vonnegut wrote. Yet Vonnegut himself seems to have been the victim less of a series of accidents than of the voracity of his own designs on fame. “Thinking about his behavior usually led to periods of depression,” Mr. Shields writes, “which in turn interfered with his work.”

This was a truth that Vonnegut, characteristically, could deal with only in doodles. In the 1970s, “he began adding six quick strokes of a felt-tip pen under his signature—an asshole. … He was an asshole, he explained …; however, ‘being human was an asshole condition.’” So it goes.

editorial@observer.com

Vonnegut, who died a year ago this week, would surely have been annoyed to find no fewer than five semicolons in the jacket copy of his posthumous Armageddon in Retrospect (Putnam, $24.95)—but don’t let that stop you from buying the book, which contains at least two priceless documents, both hitherto unpublished. The first is a facsimile reproduction of a letter from Vonnegut to his family dated May 29, 1945, in which the 22-year-old infantryman describes being captured in the Battle of the Bulge, transferred to a POW camp near Berlin, then shipped to a work camp in Dresden just five weeks before the city was incinerated by Allied bombers. It’s a brutal letter, brimming with suppressed rage, quite clearly the work of a talented writer—a taste of what was to come in Slaughterhouse Five (1969). The second document, also brutal, is an undated account of the aftermath of the Dresden firebombing, “Wailing Shall Be in All Streets.” Vonnegut tells how he and his fellow POW’s were set to work recovering bodies from basement air raid shelters:

“It is with some regret that I here besmirch the nobility of our airmen, but boys, you killed an appalling lot of women and children. The shelter I’ve described and innumerable others like it were filled with them. We had to exhume their bodies and carry them to mass funeral pyres in the parks—so I know. The funeral pyre technique was abandoned when it became apparent how great was the toll. There was not enough labor to do it nicely, so a man with a flamethrower was sent down instead and he cremated them where they lay. Burned alive, suffocated, crushed—men, women, and children indiscriminately killed. For all the sublimity of the cause for which we fought, we surely created a Belsen of our own. The method was impersonal but the result was equally cruel and heartless. That, I’m afraid, is a sickening truth.”

DOES ANYONE STILL think that “war” and “women” can only add up to “victim”? Rosalind Miles and Robin Cross’ Hell Hath No Fury (Three Rivers Press, $14.95), a curiously upbeat collection of short profiles, rewrites the terms of that equation by presenting a “comprehensive picture of women as front-line combatants and as war leaders; as civilians swept along by titanic events in global conflicts; as diplomats, spies, and spy mistresses; and as chroniclers, propagandists, politicians, and cheerleaders in conflicts large and small.” In other words, the authors introduce us to the whole gamut of bellicose babes, from Cleopatra to Maggie Thatcher to Jessica Lynch—with more to come: “As you read this, some woman somewhere is cleaning her rifle, checking her ammunition, and preparing for action.”

Playbill reports:

To the disappointment of the many who held Kurt Vonnegut in similar esteem, the writer was robbed of any significant last words when he lay unconscious after a sudden fall until his death on April 11, 2007.

For newspapers and magazines of a certain stripe, Last Interviews are the next-best thing.The Chicago-based political magazine In These Times, to which Vonnegut was a frequent contributor, published one of them; another was printed in the June issue of an in-flight magazine published by US Airways. A public radio show called The Infinite Mind presented a third in the virtual-reality world of Second Life.

Which of these is the real last interview? None of them, as it turns out.

Vonnegut and host John Hockenberry of The Infinite Mind appeared as animated characters and broadcast their conversation live into the virtual universe in August 2006. The interview was aired again on the radio show the following October, about six months before Vonnegut’s death.

In a July 9 phone interview, Mr. Hockenberry told The Observer that he and Vonnegut were “old pals” and that he had appeared on Infinite Mind before; producers who reposted a link to the interview online after Vonnegut’s death labeled this one “his last interview for the Infinite Mind.”

Overzealous linkers itching for the author’s last words were apparently confused by the phrasing, and as a result, it is referred to in a few places on the Web as Vonnegut’s last interview ever.

With Infinite Mind thus out of the running, literary historians are left with a face-off between J. Rentilly, who conducted the US Airways interview, and Heather Augustyn, who did the one for In These Times.

Both of their pieces were presented as straight Q.&A.’s—Mr. Rentilly’s ran in the magazine’s “Verbatim” department—and neither of them, naturally, knew that their conversations with Vonnegut were going to be among his last interviews with a journalist.

Ms. Augustyn spoke to Vonnegut for a piece she was working on for the Times of Northwest Indiana, anticipating a speech the writer was scheduled to give in Indianapolis in late April (The speech, which ended up being delivered by his son Mark, was supposed to be a crown jewel of the city’s yearlong celebration of Vonnegut’s work.)

When Ms. Augustyn reached Vonnegut by phone on February 28, she only had time to ask a few questions before he told her, eight minutes in, that he was feeling too sick to continue.

“During the conversation, he was really coughing a lot,” Ms. Augustyn recalled. “He’d say, ‘I’m sorry, excuse me, give me a minute.’ But at the end of the conversation he said, ‘I’m not well, I have to go, do you have what you need?’”

Ms. Augustyn planned to get more material in person at the Indianapolis lecture, but when Vonnegut died, she decided to pitch what she had as a direct transcript to In These Times because she knew the magazine was so close to Vonnegut’s heart.

In the introduction to the Q.&A. she referred to her conversation with the author in the intro text as “what was to be his last interview.” (I hadn’t heard about he U.S. Airways in-flight magazine interview,” Mr. Bleifuss later wrote in an e-mail to The Observer.)

She said she wrote that because the magazine’s editor, Joel Bleifuss, a long-time friend of Mr. Vonnegut’s, told her it was true.

But as it happened, Mr. Rentilly talked to Vonnegut for his US Airways story a week later, on March 6.

According to Lance Elko, who edits the US Airways magazine, Mr. Rentilly’s interview was going to be published anyway; the issue in which it appeared was on its way to the printer when news of Vonnegut’s death reached the newsroom.

“We were prepared to run it on its own merits, and then Mr. Vonnegut died, and we were like, ‘Wow, is this the last one?’” Mr. Elko said.

He said he talked to Vonnegut’s publicist, Ruth Weiner, who confirmed to him that Mr. Rentilly’s Q.&A. was, indeed, the last interview Vonnegut had given before the accident in his apartment.

Mr. Elko adjusted the copy to reflect this; the teaser text now read, with the slightest hint of satisfaction, “The last interview with one of America’s great men of letters.”

US Airways had the pearl fair and square, it seemed, except that Mr. Rentilly’s Q&A, as it appeared on page, was found to contain two quotes that Vonnegut had actually given Mr. Rentilly five years earlier, when he spoke to him for a McSweeney’s article. That piece, which ran as a three-part Q&A on the McSweeney’s Web site, was substantially darker and more personal than what ended up in US Airways—sample question: “Have you ever simply wanted to stop living?”—but two passages unmistakably appeared in both. One was about Vonnegut’s brother Bernie; the other was about how he tried to write in the voice of a child so that everyone could understand him.

McSweeney’s editor Eli Horowitz didn’t seem to mind the overlap.

“We have no beef with US Airways. We have no beef with anyone,” he told The Observer. “We’re vegetarians.”

But Mr. Elko, the in-flight editor, did.

He told The Observer that he confronted Mr. Rentilly as soon as he learned of the convergence.

“I was upset,” he said.

Mr. Rentilly, in a series of e-mails to Mr. Elko and another US Airways editor, explained that he had made an inadvertent editing mistake while looking over his Vonnegut transcripts side by side on a computer.

That seemed to calm Mr. Elko down.

“It’s slightly tainted that way,” Mr. Elko concluded, “but not substantively.”

Mr. Rentilly, for his part, has been quite apologetic about the mix-up: “I regret this error deeply,” he wrote in an e-mail to The Observer, “and assure you, no harm, malice, or duplicity was intended to anyone, not least of all a public hungry for what turned out to be, sadly, Mr. Vonnegut’s final words.”

Unfortunately for that hungry public, it seems The Last Vonnegut Interview Ever does not properly exist—nor will it ever, as according to Mr. Elko, US Airways does not generally run corrections because the average reader only sees 2.7 issues of the magazine per year.

Luckily, Vonnegut himself planned ahead in his last book, a collection of his essays titled A Man Without a Country: “My last words?” he wrote, ‘Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.’”

Here’s an idea: To honor the memory of Kurt Vonnegut, let’s declare a new national holiday—Vonnegut Day.

The idea of Vonnegut Day is simple: Wearing Kurt Vonnegut mustaches and wigs, we will try, for one day, to live by the principles he espoused in his beautiful books: honesty, outrage, righteous grumpiness, kindness, and the incantation, in plain speech, of certain truths normally considered too naïve to even speak aloud, much less to live by.

I will be happy to be the Commissar of Vonnegut Day. To this end, I have put together the following proposed slate of what I am calling Vonnegutian Immersions, designed to bring out the inner Vonnegut in all of us:

For the Tremendously Wealthy: In this Immersion, a wealthy person gets the opportunity to “buddy up” with a poor person, in order to see what the poor person’s day is like. The wealthy person drives to “work,” in a “crappy car” that needs a “jump-start,” where he/she will do some demeaning “physical labor” for eight hours, scrounge up some kind of disgusting/fattening lunch for under five dollars, go home to a messy house and some troubled kids he/she doesn’t have the time/energy to deal with, decide which bills not to pay, then collapse into bed while, outside, sirens wail.

For the Warmonger: Anyone enthusiastically advocating war will get a super opportunity to spend Vonnegut Day under actual bombardment in a special Bombardment SimuCenter, wearing ragged clothing, desperately searching for a family member, while a group of hostiles roam through the neighborhood, kicking down doors and making threats in a language he/she doesn’t understand.

For the Healthy: The healthy—especially the healthy who assume their health is related to virtuous living—will be injected with a special serum to make them feel exactly like they would feel if they were a poor African in the last throes of AIDS. The “afflicted” will be transported to a specially constructed “African Village,” where he/she will be shown videos of another set of human beings in a far-off, affluent land, people also afflicted with AIDS, but whose lives are being miraculously extended by medicine not available in “African Village.” When the unmedicated individuals ask why this should be the case, they will be roundly ignored by “African Village” staff, or else told to stop complaining and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

For Anti-Immigration Hardliners: These folks will spend Vonnegut Day in a special facility called Don’tGetCaughtLand, where they will have a super opportunity to do dishes, or landscaping, or back-breaking farm work, all day long, for less than minimum wage. As part of the “The Illegal Immigrant Experience,” they will be administered a special Family Remembrance Drug, which makes them long for the company of family they haven’t seen in nearly two years because, if they cross the border, they might never get back in, and will therefore once again be as destitute as they were when they first made the risky decision to come to America.

In addition, Weapons Manufacturers will be made to watch real-time simulations of their loved ones being murdered with the very weapon they manufacture; Polluters will be forced to swim naked in rivers polluted with what they discharge; People Talking a Bunch of Racist Crap will be handcuffed to an affable, kind-hearted member of the group he or she routinely disparages and left out in the middle of a vast forest, with just a box of biscuits and a bottle of water.

Some of the other activities I have planned for Vonnegut Day will prove difficult to implement, given certain technological limitations, but here’s one: For Religious Fanatics—especially those willing to kill for God—Vonnegut Day activities might include being transported to Heaven and being seated at the right hand of the Actual God, to see how He/She feels about it as the souls of His/Her creatures who have been thus killed return to His/Her loving arms before their time.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Politicians, Pundits and Talk-Radio Hosts of All Political Persuasions will simply have to shut up for the duration of Vonnegut Day, getting no attention whatsoever. No whining, accusation, rumor-mongering, dwelling on celebrity misfortune or wallowing in sickening, dehumanizing crime details will be permitted on Vonnegut Day. (Alternatively, these individuals may be permitted to stay on the air if they promise to say only positive things about the ethnic, political or national group they usually savage/exploit to further their own career ends.)

On Vonnegut Day, all across our cities and towns, special booths will be set up so that individuals can avail themselves of the opportunity to watch films that engage their natural empathy/pity, thus making them more Vonnegutian. These films might be of: animals about to be slaughtered; shy people unsuccessfully struggling to make an emotional connection by saying a first, tentative word to a person they have long had a crush on; cowering children in alcoholic households; old men and women dying alone, full of regret—for hours on end, until one’s ambient pity wells up, overwhelming our habitual indifference.

And, at the end of Vonnegut Day, the grateful nation will erupt in fireworks, parties, celebrations, jokes, dancing. And music, lots of music. (“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.”) We’ll gather in public places and read aloud our favorite Vonnegut passages. Then we’ll join our voices together and recite Vonnegut’s dual mantras—first, the words of Eugene Debs:

As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.

As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it.

As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

And then the Beatitudes:

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

"text-align: left;text-indent: 0in" class="text" align="left">Blessed are the merciful, for they shall inherit mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.

At the end of this annual, daylong national attempt to try and see the world the way Kurt Vonnegut saw it, we will be so happy! Why? Because Vonnegut’s voice is the quintessential American voice, the voice of the America we have never quite succeeded in becoming, the voice of the America that loves and honors its weak, its lame, its poor; that understands that its legacy lies in its ability to lift up and care for these, and not with how well it services its powerful.

It will be such a relief to us, to hear ourselves sound so much like the nation we have always longed to be.

Vonnegut was either the last representative of a certain American literary tradition (radical and socialist and Biblical and truly democratic, one that includes Emerson and Whitman and Dreiser and Dos Passos and Steinbeck) or—I prefer this version—a prophet of an entirely new tradition, the advance man for a forthcoming, reinvented, post-Iraq America dedicated not to filling its coffers and retaining its advantage and pummeling prospective competitors and spreading our great pigs-at-a-trough model of democracy, but rather to (humbly) using our wealth and power and creativity to lift up the weak and sick and poor, among us and far from us.

Wouldn’t that be something, to honor Kurt Vonnegut’s memory in this way? Wouldn’t he be proud of us, if we could purge ourselves, individually and collectively, of our philistinism, our defensiveness, our fear, our urge-to-deny, our aggression, our environmental sloth, and honor the essential Vonnegutian virtues: self-effacement, humor, wry wit, despondency when despondency is appropriate, and—most important of all—kindness?

Vonnegut once wrote: “If I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, ‘Kurt is up in heaven now.’ That’s my favorite joke.”

Well, I’m saying it, because I think it’s true, and furthermore, I’m saying that since Kurt may, in fact, be up in Heaven, looking down at us, that means we still have a chance to make him proud.

So that is why I have, even with my busy schedule, volunteered to be the first Commissar of Vonnegut Day.

So, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, members of Congress, the Hallmark Card Company: I dare you.

Let’s give credit where credit is due. Let’s shoot high. Let’s reward a great and true national hero. Let’s have the Kurt Vonnegut National Airport, 20 or 30 Kurt Vonnegut Elementary Schools. I want to see that beautiful face on a stamp—hell, let’s put it on our money. (Note to self: Figure out how to say, in Latin: Beloved Subversive, Great National Wise Uncle, Left a Trail of Beautiful Books.)

Although, come to think of it … hmm. I may be starting to think like him already. Let’s not get the government involved in this after all. They’ll only muck it up and start arresting people for not liking Vonnegut enough, and next thing you know, we’ll have a secret Cuban prison for people who didn’t pick out a long enough passage to recite.

No, actually, you know what? Forget the whole thing. The only authentic Vonnegut Day is the one we celebrate in our hearts and heads and guts every time we read him, with the reading to be done whenever the hell and wherever the hell we feel like doing it.

I’m going to celebrate one right now, by ending this and taking Slaughterhouse- Five out into the yard and sitting there awhile in the sun.

Vonnegut lives. He’s gone—and yet he’s not. I never met him, but he was real and beloved to me. And still is. Because Vonnegut, like all of us, was alive in two ways: physically and in terms of his influence. His truths are still as present in the world as they were last month. They fill his books, his books are read, permanent changes take place in the minds of his readers, incremental movements towards patience and compassion occur, and thus the world is saved, a little bit at a time.

Happy Vonnegut Day, every day.

George Saunders’ most recent book is In Persuasion Nation (Riverhead).

It was the late 90’s, and I was working at an Internet company. But every time I tried to take the subway to work—the thick crowd crushed together inside—I started hyperventilating. My “episodes” got so bad that I started walking the 45 minutes to and from work, even in the dead of winter.

I was a lot of fun.

So, that next summer, I hatched an escape plan. I headed to a picturesque town in western Massachusetts to attend a graduate writing program. I felt better immediately. I moved into a converted apartment in a grammar school. Kurt Vonnegut lived upstairs. He sat on the steps and smoked cigarettes and talked about melting snowcaps. I started writing my own stories. I planted a small garden. I registered to vote. I never had to wear my black pants for any reason.

A year later, I received an opportunity to continue my graduate work as a fellow in Virginia. This time, my drive was longer, winding its way through a countryside of vineyards and canons. I turned on the radio and listened to a broadcaster talk about the sickness of interracial marriage. I waited for the punch line.

But, even while adjusting to Southern living—which, thankfully, turned out to be less conservative than the radio guy suggested—never did I dream of New York. I missed Massachusetts. But I never thought: “New York. Yes. I want to go back there.”

Then Virginia, too, became home. I sat on porches and smoked my first cigar and went hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I discovered the joy of watching traffic court in Madison County. And when I had trouble with my work, I’d drive 20 miles outside of town to the wineries in White Hall. I began writing a novel in my head on these drives. And then started writing it for real.

When my fellowship ended, I had no intention of leaving. I remember so clearly, in fact, having ice cream with a friend on the downtown mall.

“Do you think about going back to New York?” she asked.

“Never,” I said.

Which was when life stepped in. A job opportunity at a small New York paper came out of nowhere. The job would give me time to work on my novel and a means to support myself. Retrospectively, this was only part of the story. The other part had to do with something else, something I wasn’t telling myself yet.

Three weeks later, I was answering the door for the local mover I’d hired. He was going to store my things until I was settled and then bring them to New York. So—with my computer, a few books and a backpack of summer clothes—I went back to Manhattan, to a small sublet on the Upper West Side. I left everything else with this man: two enormous handmade bookshelves, several hundred books, a bed, a sofa, a wood-carved kitchen table.

The next week, the mover closed up his shop and disappeared, along with everything I owned.

The day after that, my computer—complete with 219 pages of my novel—died. Or, more accurately, I killed it. In a race to answer a call from the Virginia detective who was investigating the mover’s disappearance, I knocked a glass of water onto the keyboard. I could hear the computer gasp before fading to black for the last time.

It was almost unbelievable. In a 48-hour period, I lost the sum total of everything I had managed to accumulate in the years since I’d left New York—I owned nothing, I lost all of my work.

The hardest part was that it had all become clear to me: I shouldn’t have come back. I was being punished for ignoring the reasons I’d left this city in the first place—my fears of being trapped here, or trapped in a life I didn’t want. It seemed obvious that I needed to revisit those reasons. And I was about to have no choice: The woman whose apartment I’d sublet announced via a note on the door that she was coming back that weekend, and I’d have to vacate. It was Wednesday.

How much clearer of a sign did I need? But I stayed put. I took my broken computer out of the closet and brought it to a computer expert, who extracted the 219 pages of the novel. He put it on a CD for me. I made an extra copy. I moved in with a friend on the Lower East Side. I kept doing my work and bought fresh flowers and purchased a Mac. I started taking the subway almost without thinking about it.

In New York, I was forced to keep going—and in that movement, I discovered that I could be happy here. That I could be happy, really, anywhere. I do my morning writing at this coffee shop a few blocks away from Gramercy Park. I visit with a tea maker on Columbus who swears he can see your future just by looking at you. He won’t tell what he sees, which leads me to believe him.

At 22, I had become convinced that I was running out of time—a conviction that the speed of New York seemed to confirm for me. For me, slowing it down meant leaving. I’m not sorry I did, but I’m even less sorry that I came back. I don’t have that same sense of time running away from me.

When I moved into my new apartment, I bought a bed for it, thinking that I’d slowly bank up the other necessities. Not too long after, I received a call from the Virginia detective, telling me she’d found my furniture. It was in a storage warehouse. She suspected that the mover left everything there on the way to wherever he is now.

Based on the photographs she sent, I could confirm that all of my furniture was accounted for. All of it was making its way to New York not so long after I did.

Maybe this is how it is. Things come back. But in the end, I let go of most of what had been lost anyway. The old bed and the mostly broken table. Dishes that had been cracked in the move. I even let go of 216 of the 219 pages of my novel. Just hit “erase,” like I knew what I was doing. Like I could try again. What can I say? Things had to go. There is just no room in New York apartments.

Laura Dave is the author of London Is the Best City in America, just out from Viking.