by founding editor, Linsey Abrams, who knew her best
October 1, 2024
Dear friends, readers, and loved ones,
I am despondent over losing my wife, Ann, and so are her dear and forever friends. Her cousins. Women were her colleagues in all the feminist, professional, artistic, political, intellectual, and social circles (this word) she lived in. Yes, sisterhood is powerful—yes, the personal is political. And this was our pledge to each other, though passionate love is more an ocean than an idea.
Her beloved friends meant everything to Ann. They were her and our family. Also members of her think tank. And the main characters of her life and memories, personal and historic. We are women and men of our time, united by our feminism, values, beliefs, thinking, actions, and generative creativity. I want Kamala Harris to win for Ann.
Ann lived by the credo of fairness and compassion. That women are equal, if not superior. I would say she meant that our vision is rich and essential, transformative to culture, and all lives, though never recognized or articulated in the patriarchy. This healing regard is the only thing that will ensure the living future. She knew it, and we know it. We articulate ourselves.
Ann was uncompromising in the big things, and always exactly herself with whomever she met. From a Japanese billionaire, who pointed out a 1,000 year old Buddha in his dining room while we were eating. To the homeless cab driver, Fred, who decided to pick her up at the door of CBS News, where she edited, every night at 1:00 or 2:00, when she was working that shift. They would talk all the way down to the East Village from 57th Street close to the windy Hudson River—he knew everything about music. Ann helped him appeal unjust parking tickets. The word for Ann, in its true meaning, is “sophisticated.”
I’ve come to understand, fully now, the vast circuitry of individuals and groups Ann connected to. In the City, the country, and beyond. She and I had a handful of enduring friends in Japan, Canada, Scotland, Australia, England, and France. Among her people: pilot, sound technician, doctor, acupuncturist, videographers, horticulturist, music and children’s librarians, lovers of the Blues, teachers, social workers, writers, readers, knitters, cloth doll-makers, children, children of children. Artists of all kinds. Workers. All her partners in living. We create visions of what the future might or should be. Who we are is represented in all its complexities. We can’t be reduced to a single identity.
Ann was a woman, a Jew, and a native New Yorker, in whatever order.
New York itself, and the vitality we flourished in for decades, was a way of living—Ann was imprinted by this world where you say yes to new people and possibilities, and she was curious about almost everything. Her knowledge was wide and impressive and expressive. So much captured her imagination. Ann and I lived in this stew of experience. Life with her was so often enchanting, and at other times, dire. Everyone struggles mightily, but, over time, can come to the wonders of existence. We did.
My most recent stories and novels, and literary people and notable others, overlayed everything that was hers. Ann inspired me. She was a champion of Global City Review, and added ideas to our vision of publishing true stories. Of course, imagination can be ‘true.’ They weren’t mostly ‘famous,’ but men and women who lived and witnessed lives our editorial collectives valued. These writers were known for their artistry and unrestricted subject matter, a lot lesbian and gay, were wonderfully various. Readers knew who they were or would. We published “The Iconography in Film of Deaf Mute Existence,” “A Choral Narrative by Inmates at Sing Sing,” and fiction about anything: a psychological Superman, getting AIDS, the cultures where we live. Transporting language, reinventions, deep feelings, arresting ideas.
A new collective of writers/editors have carried GCR into the 21st century—we read and admired each new issue. Like in fiction, we lived in both the past and present. Ann valued the former students and writers who are part of my life. And my, then our, beloved friends over decades, Grace Paley, Esther Broner, and Marilyn French, extraordinary writers and chroniclers of women. They paved our way.
A writer and feminist columnist in Toronto, whose presence in our lives transformed them, told me that my 1998 novel Our History in New York, was Ann’s truest eulogy. I think this is right.
Ann died at home in bed in the early hours of September 19th. She had no life-threatening illnesses. But she had the serious physical challenges of aging, which seize upon us all at different moments and in different ways.
She took personally the devolution of modernity. Trumpers’ ascendance to unbridled power. The antisemites, unabashed and evil racists. The overturning of Roe. When abortion became legal first in New York in 1973, Ann escorted women to clinics, through close hateful anti-choice crowds intent on shaming them. Politics (the enactment or destruction of the public good) was her sensitivity. The leaders she loved and respected most were Bella Abzug, Hillary Clinton, and Canadian Stephen Lewis.
In that last 24 hours together neither of us recognized that we were arriving at what would be a sea change. Ann was 75. I’m 73. All the cliches are true: It’s wonderful she didn’t have to be in a hospital. How beautiful it was that we were just living a day together, before there would be no more days. Nothing erases 42 years of those days.
Ann was powerful, brave, fierce, visionary, loving, careful, hard-working, sometimes a mind-blower, and an utterly original woman. She was the best in a jam, and gave up only a handful of times that I know. In my mind, like Atlas holding up the world. So creative, so brilliant, so committed. I fell in love with her immediately.
Whatever she did reflected an artistry both concrete and conceptual—from being a nanny, a wardrobe mistress, and working reception at Bergdorf’s hair salon to working as a young fashion designer (graduate of Parsons), when she met fine arts photographer Nina Subin, her life-long and most cherished friend. Ann had an eye for accuracy, proportion, and the most important details of what can be seen—some people see more than others.
Ann was a video-maker and sometimes photographer, driven by a desire to document times and places that meant something in her own vision. Her early feminist collaborations and collaborators were revolutionary. These women pioneered in video and video art. Technicians, inventors, and visionaries. Claiming your own subjects on ‘tape.’ Everything documented comes to life,
A newswoman in her bones, Ann edited professionally at CBS News. She was among the first few women ever hired as video editors. Imagine that. Imagine the first two camera women. The truth of editing news: TV viewers see someone jump from a building—editors see them land. At 60 Minutes she edited– choose pieces of the ‘footage’ and put them together longform stories about, for one, the great Toni Morrison—the producers wanted to cut what Ann had included about Toni’s mother working in a ‘ladies’ room, for tips to help her daughter pay for college. Ann made an impassioned defense until her bosses relented.
She became real friends over years with Charlie, a whistle-blowing CIA agent. She helped put together an expose of big tobacco, and spent months on a piece about Sister Helen Prejean (author of Dead Man Walking,) and her work with Death Row inmates and against the Death Penalty. Ann was so talkative…always with laughter. She was a mad knitter. In childhood, an accordion player. My inspiration, my deep soul spirit and home. I’m not sure I know how to live without her.
There was no organized shiva, no funeral. But there will be a memorial in early 2025. Probably in February or the first week of March. I will post and email the date and place as soon as I know. You are the people to whom Ann mattered. And mattered to her. There’s an oral history there, as Gertrude Stein would say. I think of you as peopling her family tree. Now she takes her matriarchal place in our history.
Love to all from both of us,
Linsey
Postscript: If you want to donate in her name, the best place, I think, would be the Ms. Foundation for Women. https://forwomen.org
